


The (Un)Professional

by Amand_r



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, many minor characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-14
Updated: 2011-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-16 23:25:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sir, it's out of my hands.  The gods want you to go to your Hogwarts reunion, and they want you to delete someone while you're there."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The (Un)Professional

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the 2008 Snarry Games.
> 
> This is a "frusion" of Harry Potter and the film Grosse Point Blank. One need not have seen the film to read the story, but if you have, you will note key similarities and some cribbed dialogue. And one Shawn of the Dead reference (possibly my favorite bit), along with a modified Monty Python line. Also (Also?! Geez!), this is AU for pretty much obvious reasons.
> 
> Thanks to jadzialove and RaeWhit for the spectacular betas. Late at night. In teh dark. With your mom.

"Yeah, I went to my twenty-fifth high school reunion recently. It was a killer!"  
-Ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame, on what she's been doing since being outed.

 **ACT I:**

 _you went away without/saying a word  
your simple Dear John/was carved into the door: 'I-C-A-N'_  
(The Pillows, "I think I can")

DIAGON ALLEY:

Harry screwed the silencer on the end of the SV-99's barrel and weighed the weapon in his hand. He didn't like the attachment; the silencer just made the gun look like a big cock. It was distracting. He tried not to make any noise, not because his target could hear him or anything, but because he was on the line, and he was supposed to be listening to Angelina read the order.

"Fifteen hundred rounds of the Hollow Point Boattail Match—"

Harry slid the magazine into place and smiled at the little click that it made. "No," he said, "I don't like it."

"It's on sale. Because of the thing with the fisherman's wharf you did with the plastique—"

"I don't like it," Harry repeated. "The Supreme Elite XP3. The tips are better. And get two thousand rounds of Glasers—"

"For the SIG or the .45?" He could tell by the slight condescension in Angelina's voice that she didn't think much of the Glaser order. He didn't much care. He was tired of trying to avoid shooting at apartment building walls, so safety slugs it was.

"Both."

"And on an unrelated but sort-of-kind-of-perhaps related note, should I look for Carisoprodol?" Angelina asked. From the safety of the three-story room he had chosen as his base-ops, Harry counted the number of men leaving Gringotts: five, flanking another man in the center, who looked suspiciously like ex-Minister Cornelius Fudge. _Fucking figures,_ he groaned inwardly.

"No. I'm done with that stuff," he said cheerfully, pulling the scope up to his face and looking down the crosshairs at the group. It _was_ Cornelius Fudge. "Ha." Conveniently, his hands chose that moment to tremor a bit. Harry relished the irony.

"Sir?

"Nothing. Take it out of account number five one three, six four, two two six, and then funnel it through zero one three, six two, nine three three." Harry watched Fudge peer out nervously from behind his wall of bodyguards. He had the right to be nervous. Harry panned away from him and scanned Diagon Alley center to left. There—the cape in front of Twillfit and Tattings. Harry rolled his eyes, watching the cloaked figure pull out a wand and a small knife in either hand. Knives. The Wizarding world of assassination was woefully out of date.

"I know it's none of my business, Sir," Angelina said cautiously, "but I think you might want to reconsider the Soma. It's from Canada!"

Harry clicked off the safety. "I'm working," he sang half-heartedly. The caped stabber moved towards the steps of Gringotts, wand out and already hitting one of the bodyguards, probably with an Imperius.

Angelina snorted but didn't seem to be discouraged in the least. "Perhaps Diazepam—"

"Hold that thought," Harry said quickly, before pulling the trigger and releasing a short burst of gunfire, catching the assassin in the chest. The impact carried him or her off their feet and they fell through the window of the shop. Harry turned away from his perch, crouching down as he gripped the rifle lightly. He knew what would be happening now: three of Cornelius's men would cover him with their bodies while the other two drew their wands and scanned the area.

"Now, what was that?" he asked, unscrewing the silencer and ejecting the magazine.

"Oh, never mind," Angelina told him. "Obviously you don't need it."

Still listening to the shrieks outside, Harry knocked down the rifle in record time, stowing the components in the case and slapping the post-it note portkey on top of the plastic lid. "Incoming," he said into the headset as the whole case vanished. Over the phone he could hear the clatter as the case landed on the floor of Angelina's office.

"Hold on," Angelina said, and he heard the plastic click of latches as she opened the case to visually check that everything had come along for the unaccompanied ride. "It's all here."

Harry pulled his cloak from the rickety chair and shrugged it on. "Good, now tell them that—"

" _AVADA KEDAVRA_!"

Harry dove to the floor and waited for the green jet of light to hit the window, but instead, he heard the screams of Fudge's bodyguards as they launched a volley of curses, none of which seemed to be aimed at him. Harry peeked out of the window and watched as two cloaked figures dispatched three of the bodyguards and then hit Fudge squarely in the chest with another _Avada Kedavra_. The hood of one of the capes flew back a bit and Harry could see a hazily familiar face.

"Oh sodding—"

"Sir?"

Harry ripped the headset from his ears and tucked it in his pocket, pulling his wand finally and glancing out the window again. The caped assassin team finished off the last bodyguard and threw their wands to the ground before producing whole new wands and Apparating away. Harry had to admire their willingness to waste weaponry, though he knew that it meant a hidden endless cache of wands and other items at their disposal.

And that narrowed his guesses down severely.

***

Harry had made it down the street, past the mess at Gringotts, and was sitting outside at the refurbished Florian Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor when Ron walked by. The shop was partly empty because most of the people at Diagon Alley were down at Gringotts, gawking from behind the red Auror ribbons. Harry ducked his head down and stared intently at his sundae with chopped nuts, but it was in vain. Ron's fingers reached out and snagged Harry's spoon.

"I'll make this quick. I'm on duty. It's a sodding mess down there." He didn't make eye contact as he ate the bite of Harry's ice cream, instead glancing about casually. "You know anything about that?"

Harry shrugged. "That? No. That's a sodding mess," he echoed. The next table over, two patrons nudged each other and bent over their sundaes, speaking in hushed whispers. Harry reached into his cloak and tightened his grip around his wand. Sometimes they were gawking at the Boy Who Lived And Then Disappeared. _Then again, sometimes they're Dutch garrote assassins with a picture of me in their back pockets. It's hard to tell these days._

Ron was possibly the head Auror in charge on the scene. He was probably armed to the teeth, and he was definitely angry because this was when he traditionally took his lunch. He was also very much not surprised to see Harry sitting in Florian's. Ron was too smart not to have figured a few things out.

"You and I should have a drink," Ron said, embedding the bowl of Harry's spoon deep into the bowels of Harry's virtually untouched sundae. It stood up on its own. "You know, like we used to do?"

Harry shrugged. "Fine with me, but you're on duty, right?"

Ron sighed. "Not now. Later. Somewhere," he said softly, his hands digging into his pockets. Harry realised that his hand was gripped so tightly around his wand that his knuckles hurt. How could cartilage hurt? It seemed impossible. He relaxed his hand and glanced about to see how many things within reach could be used as a weapon. It was a game Kingsley had taught him years ago and that he had once used to fill the boredom.

 _Now it's like a form of behavioural Prozac, isn't it?_ his voice of conscience said smugly.

"Oh come on," he groaned to himself. Ron glanced at him quizzically. "Uh, yeah, drinks, right?"

Ron smiled, but his hand remained in his pocket, where it should have been anyway, and his eyes darted away quickly to scan the wall behind Harry. Harry wondered what he'd seen back there, but he wasn't about to turn. If it was dangerous, he still trusted Ron enough that he'd give him the benefit of the doubt to watch his back.

That was a complete lie. He didn't trust Ron, but that was because he knew Ron knew what he did for a living, and he knew that Ron knew that he knew, and then, well all those knews became knotted and suddenly his life was a deliberately intricate Monty Python sketch. And it probably ended with bloody stumps. All the best Monty Python sketches involved something dying or already dead.

The fact of the matter was that he didn't like to validate his profession to Ron. It seemed like the last betrayal.

"So, uhm, The Winchester? Next Thursday," Harry said, trying to figure out when his body had let him zone out of the conversation. He didn't do that. He _never_ just stopped listening to the environs around him. At least, not until recently.

Ron nodded and started walking backward, still facing Harry. Maybe it was so that he could keep talking. Maybe it was because he didn't want to turn his back to Harry. In any case, it was interesting to see the people behind him scurry to get out of the Lead Auror's way. Ron withdrew his hands from his pockets, wandless, and made a 'W' with his fingers. The Winchester it was. Ron turned his 'W' into a 'five,' and when Harry nodded, and when he was a fair ways away, he turned and covered the distance to the crime scene.

Harry sighed and threw a handful of Galleons on the table, cast a quick _Scourgify_ on the immediate area, including the coins, to erase all traces of himself, especially his fingerprints (Ron may not have been born into the Muggle world, but his wife was thoroughly of that realm, and she carried all the secrets of the CSI with her. Sometimes Hermione made Harry's life very difficult, even from afar.), and set off for Knockturn Alley at a quick clip.

***

He didn't truly want anything in Knockturn Alley; the habit of taking a convolutedly twisted way out of anywhere had been impressed on him for years, and now Harry was fairly sure that his ability to take a non-circuitous route anywhere was so rusted he'd need an oil can to activate it again. He reached the end of Knockturn Alley, climbed a fire escape-like ladder to the roof, and crouched across a dozen rooftops until he could open the ceiling door and drop down into the building. Harry inched down the open stairwell, slid through the back storeroom, and emerged from the curtain into the storefront of Ollivander's, painting his face with the unmistakable look of one who was embarrassed to have staggered into the wrong part of the store. It worked most of the time.

Ollivander was at his desk, going over a large ledger that he no doubt used to keep track of his sales, though why he would need it, Harry had no idea; the man's mind was a steel trap, and would likely remain so until the end of his days. Harry skirted about the edge of the shelves with their boxes of wands and reached out to touch the handle of the front door.

"Mister Potter," Ollivander said without looking up. Harry closed his eyes for a split second, but regretted it when he realised that he'd just given Ollivander a good opening. "The next time you use my shop as a shortcut, I hope that you'll do me the courtesy of thanking me." Ollivander's eyes travelled in their sockets to meet Harry's even though his head never moved a bit.

"Oh, uh, well, yes," Harry stammered. This was more talking in a day than he had done in a while. Actually, that wasn't accurate. He talked quite a bit in his profession. He chatted up bartenders, concierges, prostitutes, valets, and occasionally got into it with Angelina, but only one of those people knew who he truly was, and now that he'd had to pretend to be himself twice in one day, he wasn't sure he was up to the task. Not like he once had been.

Ollivander seemed satisfied with his stammer and returned to his ledger. Harry was about to open the front door when he was struck with a thought. "Can we talk shop for a second?" he asked, sticking his hands in his pockets and turning away from the window with its direct and very vulnerable view.

Ollivander smirked. "Of course, though I remind you that wand-making is a very difficult and complicated—"

"Of course," Harry said quickly, glancing out the window before deciding to settle his back against one of the many box-plastered walls. "What's the actual legality of owning multiple wands?"

Ollivander did look up from his ledger then, pulling off his little spectacles and polishing them with what Harry was sure was a rag meant for his merchandise. "Well, there certainly isn't any law against the possession of multiple wands. Most pureblood families own many wands from ancestors." He wrinkled his nose in disgust. "Seem to think they can be passed on as easily as a set of dress robes."

Harry knew how unsuccessful that was. "So they don't bury wizards with wands?"

Ollivander nodded and absentmindedly picked up his cup of tea. "Oh, they do, most of the time. Can you imagine how little business I'd do if wands could be passed down from generation to generation so easily?"

Harry crossed his arms and shrugged his hair out of his face. Angelina had been pestering him to get it cut, and now he had to agree with her. "So, if I needed a wand, and I didn't want anyone to know about it, I could steal it from a grave, right? Or buy it on the black market?"

Ollivander sighed. "Black market wands are as unreliable in their construction as they are in their origins. Most black market wands are shoddily constructed with substandard materials in factories in Taiwan. Of course, a few of mine have ended up there, but I assure you that I had nothing to do with such behaviour. They are, regrettably, remnants of the wand-gathering from the end of the war." He smiled and tilted his head. "Have you found one of them? I've been trying to reunite them with their owners or families."

Harry shook his head and pushed off from the wall. "No. It's unrelated. Just wanted to know where someone would get a wand on the sly." He walked to the door.

Ollivander set his cup aside and picked up his quill. "Not at all. Always a pleasure to help out the Ministry, Auror Potter."

Harry felt the little jolt of shock run through him before he stepped out into the street. For a second he wanted to correct him, say that no, he wasn't working for the Ministry, that he hadn't for ages, but that opened a whole line of inquiry that he couldn't and wouldn't answer. It was easier to let Ollivander assume. It wasn't as if he was impersonating an Auror, anyway; he rather failed to correct an assumption. That wasn't nearly as unscrupulous.

The path through the Leaky Cauldron was pretty much fraught with nothing. Loads of people had left the tavern to gawk at the roped off area in front of Gringotts. Harry only had to avoid Pansy, and that was easy to do, since she was busy cleaning a table and levitating a tray laden with stacked soup bowls.

Once out into the London street, Harry felt marginally less nervous. He had already transfigured his cloak into a light jacket, and his wand was safely buried in the pocket. His steps ate the ground at a furious pace, and it wasn't until he was nearly half a mile away that he felt safe stopping by a phone box and sitting down on a bench that had been cemented up against a building wall.

Harry dug out his headset, donned it and stuck the jack end into his pocket, where it could touch his wand. He had long ago learned that cellular phones and magic didn't mix, with the little circuit boards and their electrical currents. The few times he had combined microchip technology and magic, he had been glad that he hadn't been wearing the headset and had instead placed it on a mannequin. The microphone portion of the headset had once had circuitry in it, but Harry had removed it. The copper wiring in the electronics was enough to carry his voice directly to the headset Angelina wore. In fact, if he had to admit it, the headset wasn't quite Muggle at all, except in appearance. But it was the only way he could guarantee that he could call her from wherever he might be and ensure that the conversation went untapped by both Muggle and Wizarding authorities.

He could have always Apparated to the wards outside of the office building and walked in to speak to her in person, but that was a pain. And the headset made him feel like a super spy.

" _Dico_ Angelina," he muttered, tapping the tip of his wand with the headset jack. He heard the telltale static and then a click as Angelina activated her own headset.

"You are in so much trouble," she said cheerfully and without preamble.

Harry stood and meandered about the phone box, scruffing about on the ground with his trainer. "They owled you already?"

"Of course they owled me. They're furious."

Harry sighed. "I was only paid for the stabber. This other thing is," he waved his hand, "irrelevant."

Angelina must have slammed a file down on the table, because he heard her desk rattle under the weight of something. "It was a Howler. A Howler the size of a Rottweiler. It's amazing that the windows aren't broken."

Harry didn't have anything to add. He wasn't going to apologise to her, mostly because his gut was telling him to apologise, and he had long ago learned that the voice of conscience inside his head was too sensitive for his chosen line of work.

 _And doesn't that say something about your chosen line of work, then?_ the voice asked him.

"Shut up you," he mumbled. Something smacked Angelina's desk again.

"The howler shorted the wiring to the CPU," she said curtly, probably because she thought he had just told her to shut up. "I had to replace the keyboard and the power cables. And I lost three levels in _Diablo II_."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Is everything ready for my trip to Madagascar?"

Angelina snorted. "Of course, all set. Have you decided what to do? Do you want me to call Walter about the ricin?"

Harry watched a car slow down as it passed him, and he almost lost the phone connection when he let go of the jack to grip the hilt of his wand. His .22 was in a holster on his ankle, so if he had to draw quickly, the wand was better. The car slowed even more as the couple inside flipped a map over and argued, stabbing the paper in front of them with their fingers.

"I'm not using it," he said, avoiding saying the name out loud. There weren't many people on the street, but people knew what ricin was. "It's supposed to be less obvious. That is not less obvious."

Angelina must have shrugged. Sometimes Harry could tell by the split-second lag in her response time that she'd expressed her doubt physically instead of verbally. "Your choice. May I remind you that the Wizarding world is still woefully behind in autopsy technology? They probably still think ricin is something you use to mash potatoes."

Harry strolled down the street and watched three children in the square ahead of him accost flocks of pigeons. "Well, isn't that a charming thought."

Angelina laughed. "Speaking of charming, I have your uh, _friend_ on the line."

"Don't tease."

"No, then well, that Confidential guy."

Harry's palms itched, as they always did when he thought about Confidential. Firstly, he didn't like referring to a person by an adjective; it wasn't normal. Secondly, Confidential, in the six years he had known him, had never betrayed a hint of his true identity. Every time Harry spoke to him, he appeared spectral, voice mapped in garbled tones. He and Confidential had done business together over the years, but Harry didn't like having to do business with anyone very much at all, so he tried to keep contact at a minimum.

"He'll just keep calling, Sir," Angelina said wearily; that she didn't like Confidential was no secret.

Harry turned to study a bakery window; it was laden with rolls and baguettes. Harry wondered if they were real or fake. If they were real, then did they ever sell the bread from the display? Or did they just throw it out day after day? Or did they feed it to the pigeons? Wasn't that illegal?

 _Wow. Lost track there. However did you manage to stay alive all these years? You could have been stabbed three times over while you were thinking about stale bread,_ his voice of pragmatism said dryly.

 _Maybe it's worth thinking about,_ His voice of conscience replied. _It's perfectly valid to take note of the wastefulness of society._

Harry turned away from the window. "None of this is helping," he muttered.

Angelina clicked a few keys on her computer. "I have to finish booking your return ticket. Do you want this call? He's holding."

"Of course he is," Harry muttered. Harry wasn't the only wizard who had cobbled together some sort of living straddling the Wizarding and Muggle world. Forms of technology that had been unthinkable in the Wizarding world ten years ago were emerging, as a whole new generation of increasingly Mugglised Wizards left Hogwarts, Beaubatons and Durmstrang. Blenders with animated teeth, hybrid cars that ran on vegetable waste, DVDs with coding in arithmancy instead of Muggle computer languages, they were all products of the new infusion of Muggle technology.

Arthur Weasley must have been beside himself.

In any case, Harry hadn't been the only one to adopt modified cellular technology. And hence, Confidential could ring him up any time, despite the fact that he was as wizard as one got.

"Oh, all right then," he said, knowing that if he left for Madagascar without taking this call Angelina would never forgive him. The static appeared again and then ended quickly when the called finally connected. "Hello, Confidential."

"Mister Harry Potter," said the voice that as usual, resembled gravel. Harry cast a _Muffliato_ and sighed.

"How are you?" he asked cheerfully.

"Where are you today?"

Harry looked about. "Oh, Geneva."

"Geneva is nice this time of year," Confidential said as he rounded the street corner, and Harry felt the call disconnect as he pulled his wand halfway from his pocket. Confidential raised both hands in front of him to show that he was unarmed. "There you are, right in front of the Palace of Nations."

Confidential didn't actually appear in the guise of a Muggle or Wizard, but more like a charcoal silhouette of a person. In fact, he wasn't quite there, as far as most eyes were usually concerned. Harry was still trying to suss out the spell that allowed Confidential to transmit his image over distances without use of a fire, Floo, or Patronus.

Harry shoved his wand back into his pocket. Most of the time Confidential was skilled at making himself unseen, so Harry was pretty sure that he would look like a madman, talking and gesturing to thin air. He turned away from Confidential to instead stare at another window, this time one for a shop that sold fine confectioneries. "Strange that you should call, you know."

"Mister Harry Potter," said the figure. "Please don't bother to pretend that we aren't visible, because we are. Right now we appear to be Auror Weasley."

Harry's hand clenched around his wand. "So, what were you doing there?"

Confidential sighed. "And also, refrain from playing games. This was much easier while you worked for the Ministry," Confidential said. Harry tried not to squint, but it was maddening that he couldn't make out the facial characteristics. They seemed quite familiar, but never familiar enough to recognise. "When you were under Kingsley's thumb, your targets rarely overlapped with ours."

Harry pulled his headset down from his ears and let it rest around his neck. He glanced away, down the street. He'd have felt much better if he were up against the wall, instead of with his back to the street. "Yeah, I imagine. Wizarding world's jobs are like feast or famine these days."

Confidential shrugged and turned his head to follow a few children who ran past them, down the sidewalk, but as far as Harry could see, he wasn't in the least perturbed by anything. _Sure, he's the one who's intangible,_ his voice of pragmatism scoffed.

"It's all so unorganised, Mister Potter. I sent my agents, and there you were."

"I didn't realise that you employed the stabber," Harry said nonchalantly. "Also, I don't care."

Confidential raised his hands. "No, _my_ men finished their job, while you have a very disappointed client. Have they complained yet?" Confidential's hands finally settled in a clasp in the front of his chest.

Harry sighed. "So what do you want? You want us to check with each other first? Some sort of union? A club? Perhaps an internet bulletin board easily traceable by Interpol and Aurors?"

"Oh heavens no," Confidential shook his head and chuckled. "I want you out, Potter."

Harry was sure that he was about to snap his wand in two. Behind him, two children shrieked and threw breadcrumbs to a flock of pigeons. Harry didn't look behind him, but he did look at the reflection in the glass in front of Confidential long enough to see them waving their hands about in the air. Well, that was okay then.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have no plans to retire."

"Oh, I don't know if that is completely necessary," Confidential said smoothly. Harry tried to keep himself from squinting as he stared at the face inside the blackness that was Confidential's spell. Was there a nose there, maybe a pair of glasses? It was hard to tell. "I was thinking that you could devote yourself to one specific sector of clientele."

"Which one would that be?"

"Muggles."

"Muggles."

"The ones outside of Great Britain."

Harry clucked his tongue inside his cheek. "You want me to stop taking jobs inside of the UK."

"Unless, that is, you are willing to coordinate all jobs through our newly founded organization," Confidential said. "But I know that's probably not something to your liking." Confidential shifted weight and spread his hands. "It's not as if you take exclusively Wizarding contracts. You could make a very good living in the Muggle sector alone."

"Uh huh." Harry tapped his foot and finally moved to lean against a window. "Who's in your club?"

Confidential drew himself up to a height. "That is quite more than I need to impart, but I'm sure today's display evidenced our organisation and resources." If Confidential could have smiled he would have, Harry was sure of it. "Did they send your assistant a howler? Was it the size of an Irish Wolfhound?"

Harry looked away. "Ha ha. You can forget your offer. I'm not going through you and I'm not changing my clientele."

Confidential turned his head to look elsewhere, and as he did, his image seemed to become greyer. "I'll give you time to think about that."

Harry smiled. "No need." But the figure was gone, and all Harry had left was a knuckle-white grip and a foreboding sense that all was not going to be well.

***

MAROANTSETRA, MADAGASCAR:

 _Down,_ Harry thought as he pointed his wand, _down, down, down._

The target below him snorted and swiped at his face. The snake in Harry's levitation spell jerked and Harry stopped lowering, holding his breath. Through the hole he'd drilled in the ceiling, Harry toggled the camera to the left and watched the target below roll over onto his side. The camera jostled as he knocked it a bit with his wand, and he tore his eyes away from the hi-res screen when it went white. The camera was dead. Again.

 _Next time, you drill two holes, plonker,_ he told himself ruefully. This was the tenth camera he'd shorted out because he'd touched it with his wand whilst casting a spell. But he'd been greedy, cocky, and impatient, so he'd only drilled one hole. Now he'd have to make do.

Harry levered his wand, causing the snake to somersault in air. Through the hole, Harry could see the white sheet of the hotel coverlet, and though his night vision was markedly less without the camera, the moon was sufficient to see the target's outline and his head on the pillow.

The Boomslang was pretty big, and Harry had worked with it a bit, magically encouraging a few of its nastier qualities, including the quantity and quality of its venin, so he was fairly sure it would produce the accident his client desired. And if this one decided to go walkabout when he released it, then Harry had its brother in the bag next to him.

Really, it didn't get any more accidental than a bite from a Boomslang in the heart of Madagascar. Well, on the coast of Madagascar.

The snake rolled in his spell and his tail drooped a little more than Harry would have liked. It brushed against the folded down coverlet and the target shifted in his bed. The snake hissed, and Harry closed his eyes for just a second, taking in a deep breath. If he lost his focus and the target woke up, he'd probably be out one snake and one client.

So of course, the next second, the target opened his eyes and of course the first thing he saw was the huge snake hovering over his bed. And of course the first thing he grabbed was his wand, and of course, _of course, **of course**_ , the first curse he cast was _Incendio_ , and Harry's brilliant plan went up in smoke.

Harry pulled his wand back through the hole and sprang for the door. In the process he stepped on the snake bag and his second charge let out some curse that he loosely translated in Parseltongue as being detrimental to his mother. He had already pulled the .38 from his belt holster when he had reached the target's door. He thought to press his ear to it, but the memory of the time Ron had almost lost his hearing on their last hit together made him lean back against the wall next to the door as he reached for the knob.

The knob turned freely, a testament to the trusting nature of a British wizard on holiday in a foreign land, and he swung the door open. It was loaded with a spring and wouldn't stay open by itself, and Harry was forced to launch himself into the doorway much sooner than he would have liked. His wand in his right hand and the gun in the left, he spun himself into the doorway and was rewarded by a burst of cursefire launching itself from the target's shakily-wielded wand. He dodged most of it, but the last _Stupefy_ caught him in the edge of the shoulder, and Harry fell backwards into the hallway. The target barrelled past him and down the hallway towards the fire exit stairwell.

" _Stupefy_ ," Harry muttered as he rolled to his feet and dashed after him. "They always use bloody _Stupefy_."

He vaulted the stairwell and landed in a crouch, his knees expressing displeasure at performing one of the many things on his new list entitled "stuff I'm too old to be doing." It took him a split second to get his bearings enough to choose the right door to go through, but he sprinted the last of the way to where the target had run through a deserted hallway and had tripped over some exposed wiring in the floor.

Harry wasn't winded when he caught up with the target, but his shoulder ached, and he'd somehow lost his wand. The gun wasn't equipped with a silencer, so it wasn't an option. The target had dropped his wand, or at least Harry hoped he had dropped his wand, or this was going to be even worse than it already was. He didn't say anything as he approached, but he did manage to grasp the knife he had buckled into his harness on his back. He didn't want to have to use it; stabbing was messy, and he didn't have a change of clothes. Or something to scrape the blood from under his fingernails.

"Whatever it is I'm doing," the target gasped, eyes wide. "I'll stop."

Harry raised the firearm, more in a warning than anything else. Even then, there was a fifty percent chance that his target wouldn't recognise the Muggle weapon for what it was. "It's not me," he said.

The target crept a little to the left, and in that second, Harry saw the wand come up. Instead of dodging the curse (a very very weak _Avada Kedavra_ , probably the only one the target had ever tried to cast, and then with no skill or intention behind it. About fifty percent of his Wizarding targets tried it as a last ditch effort.), Harry stepped into the sphere of the target's arm, and reached in with his hands, grabbing the target by the shoulders, twisting him forward and down. He looped one arm about the target's head and, once it was locked down, jerked tightly, closing his eyes with the anticipated crunch.

He'd done it a hundred times before, right?

***

12 GRIMMAULD PLACE:

"I don't understand it, really." Potter stretched his legs. "I mean, I guess if I thought about it, then I think I do it because I was kind of destined to do it, right?"

Phineas Nigellus Black's portrait glared at him.

"I think, uhm, then when it all gets down to it, you know, I didn't have a happy childhood. My aunt and uncle were quite...uhm, neglectful." Potter made a scrolling motion with his hands. "I didn't get the chance to model meaningful relationships with others. You know, until I got to Hogwarts."

Phineas rolled his eyes. "Mr. Potter, I tell you this every time you do this. I. Don't. Care. About your problems. I do care, however," he poked the edge of his portrait, "that you unlock this painting and let me out."

Potter sighed and rolled his empty teacup in his hands. "You're not being helpful."

Phineas looked down his nose at him. He'd learned that Potter was impossible to intimidate, probably because he always seemed to remember that Phineas was just a painting. It was one of many little indignities of which Phineas kept track.

"I'm trying to be honest with you here, and sometimes I think that you're not interested."

"I'M NOT YOUR ALIENIST!" Phineas shouted. Though truthfully, if he had actually been this furious, he would never answer Potter's calls from the Grimmauld portrait. In fact, his weekly 'sessions' with Potter were possibly some of the most entertaining sources of schadenfreude he'd experienced since the night Dumbledore had got drunk in his office and fallen face-first into a bowl full of Licorice Snaps.

However, no matter how amusing Potter's confessions of woe and self-centered misery were, there was only so much he could take, and by allowing Potter to think he was controlling the appointment by locking the portrait, he'd effectively bound himself into the one-hour time slot.

And sometimes the minutes seemed like hours. If he had to hear one more rambling idea about sociopathology and the lack of parent-child embracing, Phineas thought he was going to scream.

Potter's face quirked up in a smile and he picked up his teacup from the edge of the bureau. "And yet you keep coming here," he finally said, before launching into a big sigh. "I find myself thinking about him when I'm supposed to be working, and I wonder what it means," he muttered, crossing and then uncrossing his legs.

Phineas drummed his fingers on the edge of his portrait. "It means you're obsessed."

Potter blinked. "Obsessed? Really?"

"I can't be sure, owing to the fact that I'm not a _professional_ ," Phineas sneered, "but reoccurring dreams and preoccupation with the same person for the last six years? I'd say that's an obsession."

"Huh. Well, it's not as if I'm watching him or anything. I mean, I _know_ how to do surveillance, and if I had _wanted to_ \--"

Phineas shook his head for the millionth time. "Oh yes, that's right. You're a terrifying professional killer. You are the evil that stalks in the night."

Potter's head snapped up. "Hold on a minute with the evil. Who said anything about evil?" Phineas just waited for a second, counting under his breath. "You can't just drop a word like that in here. It's not evil. It's a needed service."

Phineas crossed his arms. This was the part that he liked the best: Potter spinning his amoralistic occupational jingoism.

"The people I kill, they deserve it. Do you think I go in there, guns blazing, not having done any research on them? They're all filthy." Potter's face flushed and he stood up. "You should see some of the files. They read like a serial killer's resume!" He paced to the door but didn't open it, instead facing the wood and pressing his forehead to it. Phineas was rather pleased to see Potter mildly upset; he was usually the one who did the yelling, and for a damn good reason.

"Serial killers, meaning those who kill multiple people in spurts for gratification," he said lightly, examining his cuff. To be honest, if he hadn't been coached, he wouldn't have been able to have this conversation, but his consultant was very erudite. "Does that seem familiar?"

Potter turned then, his face placid. "If you are suggesting that I'm a sort of serial killer, then you're insane. Serial killers kill for _sexual_ gratification. I kill for _money_."

Phineas blinked at him, face just as calm. That had been the response that he'd anticipated, though he was fairly sure that as Potter had said it, he'd realised just what it had sounded like. At least, that was what Phineas was hoping in some aspect.

"Whatever you say," he responded blithely. "So, what's your problem then? Running out of ways to be creative?"

Potter ignored him. "I keep dreaming about him." He sat down on the edge of the chair, resting his elbows on the arm of the chair, fingers splayed. "It's funny, in the dream, I have on these chaps and he's holding this aubergine—"

"I think you should reconsider telling me this," Phineas said suddenly, waving his hands in front of him. Potter leaned back against the cushions and did his best to look petulant, and it probably had worked about ten, maybe fifteen years ago. Instead, he just looked pathetically like a sulking grown man. "I have no desire to hear about your sexual proclivities for...that person. Or _any_ person," he added hastily. "Or anything animal, vegetable or mineral," he edited again.

Potter looked about to say something, but his Muggle watch beeped, and he stood. "I have to go," he said, eyes focused elsewhere. He gathered up his teacup and saucer, which was pointless since Kreacher would have got it himself later that week when he made his weekly clean up of the house. Phineas knew that the house-elf actually spent most of his time over at the Weasley-Grangers', willingly, part of some sort of adoption program that the master of Grimmauld Place had encouraged.

Phineas watched Potter pat himself down absentmindedly with his free hand. "Next week," he finally said to the portrait. Phineas snorted; it was the same routine every week. When Potter left he felt the spell release as he closed the door. The seal keeping him in this portrait opened with a hissing pop and then he left the Black house, pushing aside the gossamer-like strands that seemed to resemble curtains. Phineas was never quite sure if it did resemble a curtain in actuality, or if that was something he had personally dug out of the memories he had. He considered asking the others what they saw and felt when they moved from one painting to another, but he didn't quite care for their input.

"Tell, me," he asked the man standing in front of him. "Do you like aubergines?"

***

TRANS-ATLANTIC IMPORT/EXPORTS, INC. HEAD OFFICE, LONDON:

Angelina was already in when he arrived that morning. Part of him knew that she was going to give him grief for what had happened in Madagascar over the weekend, and he had to keep himself from slinking into his office quietly and out of her line of sight.

She didn't see him at first, mostly because she was playing about with the CPU in the Faraday cage, and also partially because she was on the phone with someone.

"Look Katie, I don't think that's a great idea. I mean, Wood was fun and all when we were in school but..." she trailed off, and Harry saw one of her hands reach up to pat about on the top of the cage, feeling for something, probably the screwdriver that was just out of her reach. Harry nudged it with a finger and it rolled into her grasp. Angelina dragged the screwdriver back under the desk and into the cage.

The Faraday cage wasn't fancy, but it did what it was designed to do: it cancelled out the external static energy fields of the office, which was, Harry admitted, fraught with magic. The computer was very useful, but the motherboard didn't like the occasional casting of spells that occurred around it. Angelina used magic on a daily basis, and Harry did as well, out of habit, really, and after the fifth or so computer had gone up in smoke when one or the other of them warmed up a pot of tea, they had put their heads together and done some research.

The cage was actually just a big brass box. It held the CPU, the facsimile machine, and the routing device for the computer's internet access. When Harry and Angelina had crafted it, they'd made holes at the top and bottom for the respective cords to run out.

The office itself, in a Muggle building and listed under a dummy company name, had all the standard Muggle things: walls, floors, lights, electrical outlets. Angelina originally had preferred that they operate strictly in the Wizarding world, until they had both come to the realization that the contracts the Wizarding world would provide wouldn't keep them fed.

And then when Harry had installed the computer, Angelina had discovered online video games, and that had been that.

Katie must have finished her speech because Harry heard Angelina suck in a breath, which was her obvious tell for a speech about to come.

"I agree, that was the best course of action, but the man can't cook to save his life. If he had been captured by Voldemort and—he's _dead_ , Kates, I can say it. If Wood had been captured by Voldemort and told that his freedom depended on making bolognese, he'd be—" The screwdriver clattered on the floor and rolled away under the rickety wooden filing cabinet. Harry shook his head and sneaked into his office, closing the door behind him with an inaudible click. He heard Angelina shut the door to the cage with a sonorous clang.

"Well, by all means, let him cook dinner for you, but swallow a bezoar first, please, because you still owe me fifty Galleons." Harry rolled his eyes and Summoned his cup from the side table in his office, then gave the kettle a little nudge on its thermal plate. "No, you never paid me." He heard the light speed clacking of her fingers on the keyboard. "Picking up the lunch check at the Leaky Cauldron doth not a fifty Galleon equivalency make, Kates," Angelina said, a chirp of humor in her voice.

Harry fixed himself a cuppa and then stared off at the wall for a few minutes, not listening to the exact words outside the door, but aware that they were ongoing. He watched a spider crawl along the baseboard of the far wall. He reached for a drawer and removed a nine-millimeter from his desk and began to dismantle it, setting each piece of the gun in a straight row in front of him.

It was peaceful, listening to the hum of Angelina doing whatever it was she did, and knocking down the weapon, though there wasn't much to this one: slide, barrel, recoil spring and frame. Harry dug around in another drawer for a cleaning kit. Part of him wondered when they were going to make dishwasher safe firearms.

Ten minutes later, he was in the middle of barely oiling the slide rails when there was a knock on his door. He sighed and didn't say anything. Angelina entered anyway; she didn't seem to have much fear of him. Then again, he wasn't sure he wanted to frighten her. Maybe just today, so that she wouldn't say what she was most assuredly going to say next. Harry capped a bottle of oil and set it to the side.

"Sir? They weren't happy." Angelina clutched a few pieces of paper and envelopes in her arms, and her face was one of trepidation. Her other hand clutched a mug of tea.

Harry tossed the gun rag in the trash. It was shot. "I would imagine not."

"What happened, sir?"

"He moved."

Angelina seemed to gloss over this because her shoulders remained straight. If she had been ready to leave the delicate subject, she would have been less formal. "It was supposed to look like an accident."

Harry smiled, but he ground his teeth as he fitted the barrel back inside the slide. "He. Moved."

Angelina set her mug on the edge of the desk and sat in the chair in front of it, the chair usually reserved for the invisible 'clients' but only used by her. "They want a refund."

Harry rolled his eyes and remounted the slide, pulling it back into place. Angelina watched the reassemblage with vague interest. She had one of these herself; Harry had seen to it when he'd hired her that she'd become proficient in a few Muggle weapons. It was only prudent and practical.

But back to the clients. They always wanted a refund. "I did the job. The money is gone. Did you tell them that?"

Angelina grinned. "I also recommended that they report us to the Ministry's Department of Fair Business Practices, but they didn't seem quite keen on that."

Harry drummed his fingers on the desk. "I should have used the ricin." Angelina smiled into her papers. "Don't start. The snake was brilliant, and it would have worked as well, if the target had stayed asleep." Harry repacked the cleaning kit and stashed it in the desk, wiping down the desktop with his hand. He reached for his tea and leaned back in the chair. "All of his previous nights of sleep indicated that he'd be out cold at that time. I have no explanation for his waking up."

Angelina set the papers on the desk in front of her. "Maybe he ate something spicy."

Harry sighed. "A whole job, blown by fucking curry."

"And that brings us to our new offers," Angelina said, flipping her pages. Harry wondered just what happened in her head that allowed her to segue in such a manner. He suspected that she simply didn't care for the conversation at hand and invented transitions to get to the things she wanted to discuss.

"Ooh," Angelina said, tossing a flattened scroll on the desk in front of him. "The latest. It's in French!" Harry picked up the parchment and read the header. "It's a Lycanthrope halfway house. It'd be so easy."

He crumpled the parchment into a ball. "I have scruples, Angelina."

"Oh, and this came while you were away," Angelina replied smoothly, willing to drop the subject long enough to slip a large cream-coloured envelope in his hands. Harry read his name on the front, along with the address of the office. They actually weren't supposed to get any mail here, but of course _these people_ would be able to find him.

 _Harry Potter  
Trans-Atlantic Import/Exports, Inc.  
1003 Copper Building  
Third floor, last door on the right_

"How do they find everyone?" he muttered, turning the envelope over again to stare at the large wax seal on the back, stamped with the Hogwarts crest. "All those years spent tracking down rogue Death Eaters, and I bet all we should have done was go to their alumni councils for addresses."

Angelina sealed an envelope with her tongue and made a face. "Isn't it redundant to say 'rogue' Death Eaters? I mean, isn't being a Death Eater actually rogue to begin with?"

"Good point." Harry broke the seal and let the envelope unfold itself, as it seemed very excited to do so. It burst open with a puff of glitter and confetti and the lilting voice of what could only be a very doctored Lavender Brown read out words that spelled themselves in illusions of charmed ribbons.

 _Greetings, Hogwarts Alumnus! It's difficult to believe that ten years have past!_

Harry ignored the ongoing message and instead looked at Angelina. "Past?"

Angelina smiled vindictively. "Typo."

"If it's not typed it can't be a typo, can it? Harry shook his head and brushed some of the confetti off his desk, but that was pointless as the spelled invitation continued to gush both chopped paper and syrupy exaltations of the Class of 1998.

Angelina covered her mug with her hand. "If it's a spell, we have to call it a spell-o."

Harry fished out a bit of confetti from his own cup. "A charm-o?"

Angelina sipped from her mug and watched the words continue to roll across the room, now expanding to curve about the corner and continue in an ever-widening crescent destined to become a circle.

 _Where are you today? What have you done in the past ten years? Perhaps you entered the invention industry, like Ernie Macmillan, a three-time patented charm designer for Gladrags! Or maybe you work with youth, like Neville Longbottom, Hogwarts' very own Herbology Professor! Padma Patil owns a cheese shop! And what about the elusive Harry Potter? What has become of the Man Who Lived?_

Harry rolled his eyes and Angelina snorted and made a stabbing motion with her pen.

 _Come back for a wonderful weekend of memories, fellowship and celebration! Bring your cameras, your stories and your accomplishments! Together we shall revel in the memories of the past and polish the promise of the future!_

Angelina clapped when the invitation exploded into a mini round of fireworks and then dissipated, leaving behind mountains of confetti and a flat cream-coloured card with the official invitation dates. It fluttered to Harry's desk and landed on top of the gun with a _thicka-thicka-flik_. They both stared at it, and then Angelina smiled and cleared her throat.

"So, Boss, are you going to go?"

"You can't be serious."

"What? You don't want to 'polish the future'?"

Harry stared at her dully. "I hate you."

***

THURSDAY, THE WINCHESTER PUB, LONDON:

Harry Apparated to the back alley of Fonde Street and glanced about furtively. Muggle cities, for all that he frequented them, made him feel self-conscious, like he was fifteen again, and he didn't want anyone to see him. It was a shame, a damn shame, actually, that he had lost the Invisibility Cloak five years ago in Nepal. Just thinking about it caused an irrational swell of anger. Sure, he'd managed to delete the target, but the blinding snowstorm had been a minus, and unexpected.

 _Unexpected snowstorms, in_ Nepal _? You're barmy, aren't you?_ his voice of pragmatism told him. _You knew it was November there. Serves you right for—_

Harry silenced his inner voices long enough to listen intently to the noises of the main street: people on foot, a few local kids with bicycles, and an auto with an inordinately loud bass. Ever since Confidential had issued his ultimatum, he had half-expected to be wasted every time he set foot outside. He had doubled back twice and Apparated to three different places, but the reality of the matter was that anyone who had been watching Harry and Ron's conversation last week would have been able to suss out where they had planned to meet. Harry had considered owling Ron several times in the past week to relocate the meeting, but The Winchester was something of a tradition. Loath as he was to admit it, Harry secretly refused to let go of the last few traditions he had left.

Ron was already there, sitting at their usual table in the back. Harry surveyed the pub—it was a third full, mostly the regulars whom he saw every time he came here. Hermione wasn't with Ron, perhaps because she was rather preggers and couldn't drink, but it was equally possible that she was swamped with paperwork.

Ron had already kicked the chair across from him out from under the table and was busy looking about the room while actually appearing to stare into the bottom of his pint. He was good at that, they both had been, in the time they had spent together. Both he and Ron had had to practice looking inconspicuous, Ron because of his hair and Harry because he was, well, Harry Potter.

Ron's hair was still shockingly red, but the way he carried himself was deceptively casual; his shoulders were just a little hunched in, his back a little bowed, his face a little blank, but nothing that would ever stand out. Everything about him screamed, 'I'm not even here. You'll never remember me later.' Even his jumper and denims were nondescript, and he was wearing the Muggle windbreaker that Hermione had bought him after they had got married nine years ago.

Harry pulled his chair flush with the wall and slid the table to himself as Ron lifted his glass and scooted his own seat along.

"Where's Hermione?"

"Deposition."

"At night?

"Vampire."

"Ah." Harry nodded to the bartender who was kind enough to bring him a glass of club soda even though the bar was self-service only. He was remotely discouraged that the bartender, Big Al, remembered him well enough to recall his drink order.

Ron tipped his head up and sort of nodded to the rifle above the bar. "Honestly, d'you think it's loaded?"

Harry sipped his water. "I surely hope so. An unloaded gun is just a decoration."

Ron furrowed his brows. "It _is_ a decoration."

"Oh. Well then."

Ron sighed, shook his head, and flipped a coin on his fingers, over the knuckles and then under the palm of his hand until it was back to the other side and flipping over his fingers again. Harry watched dully. Sooner or later Ron would launch into what he wanted to say without any preamble and then they would be off to the races.

Finally, the coin fell off of his hand and rolled into an ashtray with a plink. Ron drained his pint, and his eyes moved over the small crowd in what seemed like a lazy manner. "I'm laying this out once. There's been a lot of chatter. Three months ago I could have sworn I was going to have to lie for you." Ron's eyes finally ceased their roving and settled on him. "I don't want to have to lie, Harry."

Harry shrugged. "Then don't lie."

"Harold Crendaggle was found in his house, stone dead," Ron said out of the corner of his mouth, as if he was afraid of being overheard even through the _Muffliato_ he had cast when Harry sat down. "Not a mark on him, face all twisted-like." Ron widened his eyes and screwed up his mouth in an impression.

Harry shrugged. "That wasn't me."

"But—"

"It wasn't. I don't use the AK." Harry glanced about and played the 'what all in this room could be used as a weapon' game. _Bench, table, bottles, coat tree, umbrella at the next table over, Ron--_ He stopped himself and turned to stare back at his friend.

He didn't want to think about using anyone he knew as a shield. People he _didn't_ know were...less complicating. But people he did know? That created a whole realm of ethics that he for the most part was very good at avoiding.

Ron shredded a coaster, his eyes flitting to Harry. "Really, though, you could come back any time," he said. "I'm actually to tell you that Shacklebolt's offer stands. Head of the unit."

Harry snorted. Shacklebolt would put up with a lot from him if it looked like he was still considering the offer. Not that he was considering the offer. "You don't truly want to know what I make, Ron, and I don't have to do things I don't want to do."

"Are you doing anything you want to do now?" Ron countered.

He had an answer for that, but it wasn't anything he could say, not truthfully. What he didn't want to say was that he had been sick of taking jobs for reasons other than actual justice. Kingsley had made a murderer out of him, in the end, he had realised. And he had done it willingly, perhaps a little too willingly. He had set down his badge, walked out, and set about the business of killing people who deserved it.

 _Do they all quite deserve it?_ his voice of conscience asked him. _Every single one of them?_

 _Would you honestly be there if they didn't?_ his voice of pragmatism answered. _By the time they come across your desk, someone's already decided that they're on their way out. If you didn't do it someone else would. At least you're humane._

The voice of conscience snorted, and Harry rolled his eyes at his own inner monologue. Ron was busy ordering chips and vinegar. _If that's the only logic you have for your profession, you ought to think about setting up shop as something else._

"As what, a florist?" Harry said aloud before realizing that he'd answered himself in public.

Ron raised an eyebrow. "You still doing that thing, eh?"

Harry sighed. It was pointless to try to deny it to him. "How's Hermione?" he asked, changing the subject. Ron was easy to sidetrack when he was asked about family. Probably because to give the latest updates on his own wife and kids and then the rest of the Weasley clan took up so much time that any reasonable person would have well-forgotten the previous subject by the time they were finished.

Ron rolled his eyes then, and Harry wondered if he was mocking him. "Pregnant women are forever a mystery. If I don't bring these chips home to her when we leave, we'll end up having a 'discussion,'" --here he used finger quotes-- "in which it will be decided that I might prefer to sleep on the sofa. The _sofa_ ," he added for emphasis.

Harry laughed. "And they're not even very good chips," he muttered, keeping his voice low so that Big Al, the bartender and resident cook wouldn't hear him. Ron shrugged. "Then again, the worst ones are always the best, right?"

Ron smiled and tapped the side of his glass. It took Harry a second to realise that he was tapping the melody to a popular Muggle song. He must have been spending more time in the Muggle sector. Harry wondered if he had been doing his share of liaison to the PM yet. Shacklebolt liked to keep someone in the Muggle PM's office just to keep an ear to the ground. Harry had always thought the Muggles should have had a liaison in the Ministry. He pitied the Muggle who ever got that post.

"So, this reunion thing—"

"Oh please," Harry said, slamming down his glass. "Don't tell me that you're going to fall for this tripe."

Ron finished his beer and signalled for another, one eyebrow cocked. "Hermione wants to go." He set his own glass down with emphasis. "She's pregnant, Harry." And then, with a resigned sigh, "The sofa, man."

Harry nodded.

"You know," Rod added thoughtfully over his glass. "I think she just wants to see the complete wreck that is Pansy Parkinson, waitress at the Leaky Cauldron."

"Maybe Malfoy is going bald," Harry mused, staring off into the corner where a few men Harry didn't know were playing some sort of electronic betting game. No one cast their eyes in his direction, but it was worth remembering them anyway.

Ron sighed. "If only. I saw him yesterday at work. Still has that stupid cane-wand like his dad. Speaking of—" Ron began, but Harry cut him off with a hand motion.

"No."

"You don't even know what I was going to say."

"We were talking about Draco, so there's only one way that could go."

Ron grinned. "I was going to ask if you'd heard the rumor about Draco's wife and that skin thing."

Harry shook his head. He'd been out-maneuvered. "Oh." _Way to jump the gun there._ "What skin thing?"

Ron shook his head. "Beats me. I was actually going to ask you about Snape."

Harry frowned.

"Because you know he doesn't leave Hogsmeade."

Harry frowned more; he could feel it.

"Because of that thing, with the press. So you know he'll be there."

Harry wondered if it was possible for his frown to actually succumb to gravity and slide down his face and clang like a horseshoe onto the floor.

Ron wasn't remotely finished. "And you'll have to be in the same room for—"

"I'm not going."

"—like five minutes. It's summer; he's probably locked in a potions lab or something." Ron smiled. "I wonder if he's even realised that you left."

Harry stared at him dully. "I hate you."

***

"You know you want to come," Ron said as they left the pub and moved to the alleyway across the street to Apparate away. "Ten years." He smacked Harry's shoulder. "Ten years!"

"Yeah," Harry said, reaching in his pocket for his headset. He had a call to make.

Ron sighed. "Ten years. Are you starting to get a sense of your own mortality?"

Harry looked up suddenly. "What?"

Ron glanced over at him. "I asked if you wanted to go back to the house with me."

Harry widened his eyes. It had been a long time since he'd misheard someone. In fact, this was something entirely new. He covered his surprise by waving the headset in his hand. "No, I have a call to make."

Ron shrugged. He switched the newspaper packet of chips to his other hand and produced his wand, glancing furtively down the street as they ducked into the alleyway. "Right then. But Harry," he said softly, and with a sort of urgency in his voice. Harry looked up from unfolding the headset and cocked his head. Ron's face lost the teasing look he'd had moments before. "I trust that you'll keep this confidential," he said, and Harry froze, "but there are things in play at the Ministry, and you have to be _very careful_. Do you understand what I'm saying? In a completely noncommittal, innocent and nonprosecutorial way, of course," he added.

Harry smiled. "Of course." And he meant it. Completely.

Ron turned on the spot and in a flash was gone. Harry called Angelina. There were gunshots in the background followed by a string of curses and then a clicking of computer keys; everything went quiet.

"Hullo Boss," Angelina breathed. "I was thinking I was going to be trapped here forever."

"You getting in some target practice?" he asked, eyes running down the street and counting the number of open store fronts on the road before deciding to skip it and take another with considerably less glass to see out of. And into.

Angelina ruffled some papers on her desk. The mic picked up everything. "First person shooter. The controls are bollocks. You're later than scheduled," she admonished. "You see Ron?"

Harry ducked into the next alley down to finish the conversation. He cast a _Muffliato_ and leaned against the wall before thinking better of it, scanning the rooftops of the buildings instead. Once he'd deleted a target by dropping a weight on him from the top of an office complex, an idea he had culled from old Muggle cartoons. "Yeah. You and I are cordially invited to take positions at the Ministry."

Angelina snorted. "I have a new job for you. You should have the paperwork when you arrive home, unless you're hiding in between buildings again." Harry shrugged and left the alley; sometimes she was uncanny. "And speaking of being cordially invited—" she began brightly.

"No."

Harry stared at the moon, rolling across the sky. Well, it was too slow for him to actually _see_ the movement, but he knew it was there. Years ago, when Shacklebolt had been training them all in the art of lying in wait, he'd made them sit for hours, watching blades of grass grow. Harry had never actually seen the blades move, but he had spent many hours lying very still, thinking of ways to assassinate people with everyday objects.

Angelina sighed. "I do wish you'd go. I went to mine."

Harry scanned the skies. "How'd that work out for you?" he asked, not wholeheartedly caring, but making small talk nonetheless.

"It was cracker. George sicked in a suit of armor and then spelled it to empty itself in Filch's office."

The corner of Harry's mouth twitched. "All my former mates, horribly pissed, then?"

Angelina laughed. "What else?"

"Why do you want me to go?"

"Truth?"

"No, lie," Harry replied dryly, rolling eyes.

"Hermione owled me thirty Galleons and naked photos of Viktor Krum."

"Really?"

"Of course not. You told me to lie. Hermione just asked me to." He heard the clack of keys. "And I think it'd be good for you, you know, to visit. You haven't seen him since—"

"Will everyone stop talking about Snape?" Harry growled, scaring a pair of lovers out for a stroll. The man reached about his girlfriend's waist and increased his speed, and Harry didn't blame him. He had become one of those oddball people, screaming into a headset.

Angelina was silent for a second, and then – "I was talking about Dumbledore's portrait. Who brought up Snape? Ron?"

"Forget it," he mumbled, staring at the shadows cast by the street lamps.

"So I figure that if you take this job, then we'll be even for this quarter," Angelina finished. "And it's in the last place you would suspect."

"Disney World?"

"So come on back, our beloved students!" Angelina's voice chirped mockingly into the headset. "Let us bask in the memories of yore, and share in the accomplishments of our lives!" Harry fell backwards and banged the back of his head on a skip.

***

AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION:

Confidential folded his hands and watched the text appear on the book in front of him. Every so often he reached for the quill and wrote a reply, watching as it soaked into the page and made its way to...well, to wherever his client was. Confidential wasn't terribly curious.

Celestina Warbeck warbled in the background, and Confidential sat back a little bit more into his chair. Somewhere, a cat meowed. He picked up his tea.

The book flashed a little bit as new text appeared on the paper: _Hogsmeade contract has been terminated. Services granted to an alternate vendor._

Confidential missed his saucer with his teacup. "Alternate vendor? What alternate vendor?"

 _Preparations have begun in good faith,_ he wrote, pressing very hard with the quill and even stabbing through the paper when dotting the last I.

There was no answer from the page. The connection had been severed. Confidential leaned back in his chair and stared at the wall decor. "Potter."

***

 **ACT II:**

 _You know there's always more than one way to say exactly what you mean to say._  
(Fastball, "Out of My Head")

HOGWARTS:

Harry had a small disagreement with the house-elves taking the baggage up to the castle when he arrived at the gates. The house-elves were available at the gates to take luggage to the castle so that their owners could meander up on foot or walk about Hogsmeade. All alumni had been invited to stay in their old house dormitories, but the inns in Hogsmeade were open for business. Harry figured that there would be husbands and wives and boyfriends and et cetera et cetera et cetera, but he was pretty sure that the school would still be fairly full.

Whatever the situation, Harry was less than willing to allow the elves to take his bags, and after playing tug of war with one who was ecstatic to whisk his bag full of weapons, detonator caps and C4 up to the Gryffindor Tower, Harry trudged up to the castle. He fervently wished that he had brought a broom for the trip, not because the walk was long or overly taxing, but because the walk was completely exposed. He had already thought of fifteen ways he might have taken himself out before the castle loomed and he stepped into the open doors, breathing in a home-like scent that he had all but forgotten.

Harry managed to avoid every and anyone on his way to the dormitories. It wasn't that he didn't want to chat, although he didn't want to chat, not truthfully, but more that he was itching to safely deposit his bags in a secure place so that he might do some exploring.

The staircase moved when he was halfway up, and he had to set his bags down and wait for it to realign before taking an alternate route in order to reach the Fat Lady's portrait. For a second he stood in front of the familiar painting, wondering if he had missed an important notice from the house-elves or something.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "Password?"

Harry sighed. "I don't know the password."

The Fat Lady smiled and the portrait opened. "Welcome back, Harry Potter!"

Harry shook his head as he clambered through the hole in the wall. The common room was fairly deserted, but he could hear the faint noises of people being rather loud and not bothering to hide it. He climbed the stairs to the boys' dormitory and found his old room with a sense that he had only stopped doing this weeks ago, instead of years.

The source of the noise was actually located in his room, so he braced himself for a second before entering to find Neville and Seamus animatedly talking while Seamus unpacked a set of dress robes. In some ways neither of them looked different: Neville was still tall and boyish, his limbs seeming to be too long for him, and Seamus, despite putting on a few pounds, still had the same haircut, one that Harry had secretly thought involved a bowl and some maternal influence.

Neville saw him first, and through the barrage of manly handshakes and hugs, Harry tried to remind himself repeatedly that he wasn't being embraced for a knifing or grabbed for a deadly Mongolian wrestling match. The former was an old trick, and the latter a remnant of a horrifying experience involving a sumo wrestler named Okura. Greetings and backslaps and gross abuses of language flowed, until finally Harry was able to get away and deposit his baggage on his old bed.

The curtains were probably the very same ones. Harry reached out and fingered them, closing his eyes and wondering when he'd last fallen prey to something that felt suspiciously like sentimentality. If he wasn't careful, he and Ron and Hermione would be solving some sort of mystery, and then he might die and come back to life. Again.

For the millionth time, his thoughts flashed briefly back to the Resurrection Stone and its inadvertent burial in the forest. Finding it would be near to impossible, but he was tempted to get a shovel from Hagrid and go on an adventure. Then again, without the cloak it was fairly useless, and that was probably lining the mating nest of a yeti in Northern Nepal.

"The students always try to figure out which one was yours," Neville said from behind him, startling him from his musings. "Every year there's a fight about it."

Seamus laughed. "I bet the Headmaster _loves_ that."

Harry flinched. He wasn't ready for Hogwarts' Headmaster. Not yet. "I would have thought they'd have put in a plaque by now. Cordoned off the whole bedroom as a museum to the heroes of the Hogwarts battle."

Neville crossed his arms and his mouth twitched. "There was a petition." Harry groaned and opened his clothing suitcase. He had dress robes too, new and shiny ones that Madame Malkin had told him to hang up immediately if he wanted to look remotely respectable when he wore them, and God help him, he _wanted_ to look respectable, even if he had a hard time admitting to himself why.

Seamus kicked his suitcase in the corner of the room and fell backwards into his bed, using his fingertips to pry at the headboard. "I left a Skiving Snackbox back there. I wonder if it's still—ah!" His hands returned from behind the pried up boards, bringing with them a dusty box of shocking magenta. "Nosebleed Nougat. Wizard."

Neville sat on his own bed and bounced a bit. Harry wondered if he was going to stay with them, even though he had his own faculty quarters; when he spied the potted plant on the nightstand, Harry guessed that he wasn't the only one struck by sentimentality. Now all they needed were Ron and Dean, and it would be a full house.

"What are you going to do with that?" Neville asked.

Seamus opened the box and pulled out a paper-wrapped lump of nougat. "Thought I'd slip it in Zacharias's treacle tart tonight."

Neville looked sceptical. "What if it's expired? Expired things can have adverse effects."

Seamus handed him a nougat, smiling. "Oh, okay, not Smith. Goyle, then."

Neville pocketed the treacherous sweet. "Done."

Harry snorted and finished putting the complicated robe on a hanger. "I'm so glad that the years have matured us."

Neville rose and patted him on the shoulder, and Harry had to fight not to grab that hand and twist it behind Neville's back. "That's what the twenty-year reunion is for," he replied as he walked to the door.

"Yeah," Seamus said, tossing the box on his bed as he stood. "This one is for drinking, bragging and getting revenge on everyone who pissed you off when you were in school. Oh no." He looked worried. "Is Parvati coming?"

"She was on the planning committee." Neville stopped at the doorframe. "We're going to go on a walkabout. Want to come?"

Harry closed his clothing suitcase and did the clasps. He had never been one for unpacking, and now was no exception. All his clothes could stay in the case until he needed them. The other case, however, had to be taken care of. "I, uh, yeah, but let me change first. I'll meet you downstairs."

When he was sure that he was alone, Harry opened the weapon case's three locks and unfolded the paneling inside to reveal the top layer of contents: scopes, three handguns, five knives of varying length, assorted accessories including a silencer, wire in different gages, and multiple magazines. Embedded in the frame of the case was a thin rope of rolled C4, and a small foil-wrapped package of detonator caps. Underneath this layer was another level for a smaller version of the SV-99, the sniping rifle he'd used two weeks ago. And in between that was a sealed envelope with the details of his target.

Harry smoothed his hand over the envelope. He'd planned on opening it here and now, taking out his target if at all possible before dinner time, and then spending the rest of the weekend stalking Snape and hanging out with Hermione and Ron. He reached for the envelope, but then he heard Seamus laugh at something downstairs and thought better of it.

Harry repacked the case and snapped it shut, stowing the whole thing under his bed. He'd look at it later, maybe tonight or tomorrow morning. He used his wand to switch the colour of his shirt so that it looked like he'd changed, and then left the room with a quick sweep of his eyes.

As they meandered down the halls, Neville pointing out changes and improvements that had been made since their stay, most of them brought about by the post-battle remodelling, Harry found himself tense and alert, waiting for a dark figure to appear in the hallway, to stride towards him, to come out of nowhere, to reach out with both hands and grab his face and—

Oh hell, he'd probably have hexed him. Harry patted his wand pocket compulsively.

Once they were in one of the lower hallways that led to the outer corridor, and apparently Neville felt that enough polite time had passed for him to broach the subject, he officially became the first of what Harry figured would be many people to ask him what had happened to him. Harry hoped that he had a good answer. Not that he'd given it much thought. In fact, he hadn't really given this whole weekend much thought beyond dreaming about leather chaps and aubergines.

"Really, Harry, what happened? Minerva says that you fooled them all in the Gryffindor teacher pool."

Harry snorted and stuffed his hands in his pockets. Neville sat on the edge of the windowsill. "There's a Gryffindor teacher pool?"

Neville smiled secretively. "There's a lot of things about the staff that we didn't know when we went here." He leant forward and whispered, "They like to get pissed on Friday nights and play Extreme Exploding Snap."

Harry was about to reply when Seamus interrupted them. "Does Snape play?" And then Neville made a face at him, he blurted out, "Oh, sorry Harry."

Neville shoved off from the window. "If it makes you feel any better, I think he's planning to boycott this weekend. When I asked him if he was coming, he said something about freezing in the afterlife." Seamus snickered. Harry shrugged. That was easy enough to change, and he had plans for that situation.

They made their way about the castle with ease. The spring air was bracing and warm for May, and it was very easy to let Neville guide them across familiar terrain, pointing and laughing and shaking heads. Neville was about to escort them into his greenhouse when Harry peeled away from them. "Are Ron and Hermione in yet? I said I'd go with them to visit Hagrid."

Neville shook his head. "Ron told me last week that they'd be here in the afternoon. Something about Hermione at S.P.E.W., drafting legislation...." Neville trailed off and made a confused face, shrugging. "Something about Beings' Rights." He opened the door to the greenhouse and leaned in the jamb. Seamus sneezed and mumbled something about allergies to sunshine.

Harry blinked a few times, thinking that he should have had some sort of human reaction to information that didn't involve shrugging, of which he seemed to be doing a great deal. "Oh, alright then. If you don't mind, I need to send an owl."

Neville shrugged; apparently Harry's physical reaction disease was catching. "Not at all. What are your plans today?"

"Yeah," Seamus said brightly. "We're going to the Broomsticks later, see if we can't revive the Post Battle Pisser Party. Remember?"

Harry remembered. His stomach, which had been much abused that night, also remembered and turned a bit, and Harry was blessedly glad that it was mostly empty. "I remember. You made me drink some Muggle caraway liquor from Denmark," he said, glaring at Seamus and backing away from the greenhouse door in preparation for a quick sprint to Hogsmeade.

Seamus grinned, the sheer number of teeth visible in his smile seeming to violate medical possibility. "Akvavit. The drink of champions. Hogwarts Champions."

Neville stuck his hands in his pockets and shuddered. Harry knew how he felt.

But Seamus was waiting for a reply and Harry had to say something. It was easier to agree to everything and then make excuses later. On the other hand, he had no pressing business, aside from seeing the ex he'd been obsessing over for years, oh and also deleting someone. "Sure. I thought I'd go down into Hogsmeade anyway," he said, squinting into the sun. "Visit the Shrieking Shack."

Neville cocked his head. "Really."

***

Harry stared at the building, feeling something like nausea and hilarity warring inside his throat.

The walls of the Shrieking Shack had been replaced with wood and brick, the roof with golden thatch, and the skewed windows with clean panes of glass. The chimney puffed merrily, and the path was clean of debris. The fencing had been torn down, and instead a commemorative plaque about the former Shack's purpose and placement in Wizarding history gleamed in the late morning sun. A wooden sign swung above the door, its paint fresh and vibrant as it spelled out the name of the establishment: The Phoenix Feather.

The image of Neville's face popped up in Harry's mind has he walked slowly through tall grass that should have been fenced in, and he heard his one word response to Harry's plans in a much more ominous tone. Sometimes, Harry would have liked real life to have had soundtracks, so that at the moment Neville had said "really," the massive London Philharmonic Orchestra playing the Jaws theme in the background would have warned Harry to brace himself for what was to come.

Harry was sure that he wouldn't have been able to brace himself anyway. Instead, he felt the urge to scream a series of questions, the first and foremost being:

"What the fuck?!" Harry spread his hands in a gesture of questioning to no one, since he was alone. The Shack, well, now the pub, was set apart from Hogsmeade proper, and there was no one about to witness the Boy Who Lived become, for a few seconds, the Boy Who Raved and Tossed About Expletives.

Why hadn't someone told him? How had Snape allowed this? How had anyone allowed this? Why hadn't someone told him? Wasn't the popular opinion that this place was haunted? Why hadn't anyone told him?

After striding purposefully to the door, intending in all ways to storm into the pub and demand answers, Harry opened the door only experimentally, holding his breath when it swung open with nary a creak or groan. So much for Sturm und Drang and the wrath of, well, just wrath. The first few steps into the shack didn't meet with any danger, so Harry inched in further, letting the door close behind him with a light thud.

The floor was polished wood, obviously a few years old, but still fairly fresh and new. The bar gleamed with the shininess of care, and the tables, while scuffed and dented, were sturdy and free from dust. Not a trace of blood, or dirt or anything structural that Harry might've recognised was visible.

Harry walked through the rows of tables, half-afraid to touch them for fear that they might burn, and was about to approach the bar when a squat older man emerged from what was probably the kitchen, saw Harry and threw a tray of mugs into the air with a surprised shout. Harry had already pulled his wand and was on the second syllable of _Stupefy_ before checking himself, and in the following seconds of shattered pottery, rapid heartbeats and chest clutching, managed to not only knock the man over but also step on the only unbroken mug that had landed on the floor.

"Cor, you gave me a fright!" the man said, holding out his hand when Harry offered to help him up. "Pub's closed till four," he said, dusting his hands off. "Private party tonight."

"The door was open," Harry replied dumbly. His wand was already out, so he cast a _Reparo_ on the mugs and watched with some satisfaction as they all found their missing pieces and mended.

"You're Harry Potter!" the man exclaimed, clapping his hands together once with the delight of the discovery. He seemed about to say something and then stopped, his hands freezing in mid-clap. "You _are_ Harry Potter, right?"

Harry sighed. "Yes."

The man's face brightened again. "Well, let me pour you a drink!" He turned away from Harry then, rounding the counter of the bar and already reaching for a mug. "We're not open yet, but it's the least I can do for—say, you drink, right?"

Harry was having trouble following the man's conversation. He was still looking at the floor, thinking about how different it was ten years earlier. How much dirtier, how much bloodier. Had they actually left any of the original building? Anything at all that he could see?

"Uh, no," he said finally, "I don't drink. How long has this place been here?"

The man set the mug he'd retrieved down on the bar. "Oh, 'bout four, maybe five years. Ever since the windstorm."

Harry leaned on the bar a little bit, his hands flat on the polished wood. "The windstorm."

"Right you are. Name's Jim, by the way," Jim reached out and clasped Harry's hand, pumping it up and down again for an overly unnecessary amount of time. "Storm came through one night and just took the whole shack with it. Didn't make a sound." His brows knitted and he put his hands on his hips. "Was quite odd. No one heard anything, but when folks woke up in the morning, the whole thing was demolished, glass and wood everywhere."

Harry shoved one hand in his pocket and felt his wand. His fingers tangled in the phone headset cord. Jim continued to talk, coming from behind the bar to collect the remainder of the mugs he had dropped when Harry had startled him. "So, after we got all the bits picked up, there was talk 'bout making a monument or something, for the heroes of the Hogwarts Battle, you know."

Harry nodded. That made sense. In fact, so far he hadn't seen a monument, and he had been so sure that there would be one, bigger than life. When he had left, the Memorial Committee had been talking about something roughly the size of one of Neville's greenhouses. He could only hope that Snape had managed to encourage them to pare it down a little. At one point someone had asked Harry to stand for a life-sized statue; he had disappeared the following week.

"So then we said, well if they're planning to make one of them monuments at Hogwarts, then we'll build our own sort of monument. No sense in letting good property go to waste with another round of statues and the like, right?" Jim hooked a mug into the ceiling above him.

Harry backed away from him a bit so that he could see more of the room without turning his back on Jim. "Yeah, I get that," he said.

"So then me and Bob –you know Bob—laid out the timber and well, here we are," Jim finished. Harry didn't have the heart to tell him that he had no idea who Bob was. "They never did build a memorial at Hogwarts, so me and Bob, we had that bronze plate made outside. Does wonders for custom, I'll tell you."

Harry ran his fingers down one of the tables. "How does the town support three pubs?"

Jim laughed and finished hanging his mugs, then picked up the handle of a broom. "Tourism, my boy. Everyone wants to see the place of the final battle. Broomsticks has more than it can handle, and the Hog's Head isn't a very sav'ry place."

Harry recalled Aberforth and his goats. "No," he laughed. "I would imagine not. But Headmaster...Snape, what did he have to say about this?"

Jim smiled then. "Never seemed to care, him. Bought us the sign out front." Jim smiled. "A lot better than I could have painted. Never set a foot in here since." Harry glanced out the window and caught a glimpse of a familiar face staring back in at him, crouched down in the bottom of the frame. Harry let Jim babble on as he opened the door and peeked outside, his wand out and pointed in the direction of the spy.

If he was right, he'd just seen Rodolphus Lestrange, which was most unsettling because he was supposed to be very dead. If he was wrong, then it was equally unsettling that Harry had been sure he'd just seen a dead Death Eater. Either way, Harry figured he'd lost.

By the time he could safely clear the door, the figure was gone, but the dirt and mulch below the window showed footprints. Of course, someone could have used the bushes to sick up the night before. Inside he could hear Jim still talking, but Harry ignored him and made a round of the building with no success in locating the sneak. He was fairly sure that he was either being followed or going mad. For once, the former would have been welcome.

Harry didn't bother to do more than stick his head back in the pub, glare at the offending interior for merely existing, and mumble something lunch at Hogwarts. Jim waved merrily and reminded him about the private Hogwarts party later, but whatever he might have said at the end was cut off when Harry closed the door and dug his headset out of his pocket, bypassing the headband and just pressing the earphone to his ear as we walked.

The static cut off almost immediately, followed by Angelina's standard greeting. He cut her off abruptly. "I can't talk. I need you to find out who's up here besides me. I'm being set up."

***

There was a luncheon at Hogwarts, Neville had told him earlier, and even if he hadn't, Harry probably would have returned to the castle to open his paperwork or mill about in the courtyard, waiting for Ron and Hermione to make an appearance. The weather was good, and on his journey back to the castle, Harry saw brooms swooping about the lawn and in the Quidditch pitch. The great lawn was host to a few makeshift pavilions, festooned with streamers in house colours. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry to get to the castle, turning their brooms towards the front doors, some of them racing. Harry picked up his step and decided to filch one of the brooms from the Quidditch shed the next time he went down to Hogsmeade.

Lunch was a veritable smorgasbord of the Hogwarts house-elves' greatest hits: steak and kidney pie, potatoes in multiple incarnations, Cornish pasties, roast chicken, vegetable platters too heavy to pass, varying desserts, and pitchers of pumpkin juice. Apparently, alumni would have to get alcohol elsewhere. Harry loaded his plate with vegetables and chicken, ate while sandwiched between Neville and Seamus, and listened to Seamus tell them about his exciting life in the fast-paced world of product marketing.

Harry nodded yes and no to questions, and managed to make sure his mouth was sufficiently full whenever he was asked anything that involved a longer answer. Eventually, Parvati, who sat across from them and glared at Seamus, grew tired of being nearly sprayed with half chewed vegetables and ceased asking him about his job, life, living arrangements, significant other, et cetera.

The tables were by no means full, but a glance about the room revealed that people were first and foremost gravitating to their house tables. Slytherin table was the sparest, with about five or six individuals hunched together. Ravenclaw table hosted a huge stack of books and former students, animatedly flipping pages and arguing with waving hands. Gryffindor table was arrayed in clumps, such as the Harry/Parvati/Neville/Seamus one, but it was Hufflepuff that was the most impressive, half of its house table already filled with chatting people, some of whom Harry recognised, and others who must have been spouses or other relations. Harry saw Justin Finch-Fletchley handing out quills and made a beeline for the doors to the great hall as soon as he'd mumbled excuses to his friends.

Harry was on his way to the Quidditch shed to pilfer a broom when a strange tingling sensation came over him and he looked over his shoulder.

Snape leaned against one of the courtyard pillars, arms crossed, long robes draping over his frame. His feet were crossed at the ankles. Sunlight poured in over his shoulder, gleaming off his pulled back hair, cutting the edge of his jaw as he tilted his head to it, as if he had simply been standing there and waiting for the exact moment the sun would hit his face, illuminate it just so. The background of the courtyard was a lawn of grass, so that to a painter's eye he was haloed in green.

His fingers tapped a little on his upper arm, his lips twitched with what some would have guessed was good humour if it had been anyone else, and his eyes narrowed slightly when he finally made contact with Harry's face.

Harry thought for a split second about how long it had taken Snape to orchestrate such an entrance, and then he remembered that Snape didn't care for such things. This appearance on a seeming field of cloth and gold was completely accidental, and therefore to Harry an even greater sign that even nature in all its aspects was to be siding with Snape in the impending argument.

"At this moment," Snape said, his eyes lazily glancing elsewhere. It was a trap; Harry was sure of it. "You are asking yourself what the best way to avoid the awkwardness might be." Here Snape released one of his hands from his chest and rolled it by the wrist slightly. "My advice is that such things are completely unavoidable, and exist for a reason."

Harry widened his eyes and reached for his wand in his pocket. "Severus—"

"Speaking of reasons," Snape said slowly, cutting Harry off, "I imagine that you have quite a good one to offer me. However," and here he raised one finger, "I shall remind you that I have now, as ever, precious little patience for lies, idiocy and excuses." He cocked his head in thought, looking elsewhere for a split second. "When one isn't spying for the enemy, of course."

"Of course," Harry said dumbly, finding that he was more than willing to go along with a diatribe that, unlike his appearance, Snape had most assuredly crafted ahead of time. Or not. He was mysterious that way.

Snape left his pillar and took a few steps in Harry's direction, but he was apparently in no hurry. All Harry's dreams of a bruising face grab of affection, perhaps a knee trembler right then and there, while images that he had confined to the wishful thinking portion of his mind but secretly hoped for a little too much, deflated to two dimensional pornographic paintings in his mind.

"It's great to see you," Harry stumbled, while four alarm sirens went off in his head. It was possibly the most reactive and idiotic thing to say at this point in time. "You uh, you look great."

No, wait, _that_ was the most idiotic thing.

Snape ventured away from the courtyard and further into the hallway. "This morning, I was thinking of a scenario I personally witnessed years ago," he intoned. "I'll frame it for you in the _hypothetical_." He crossed his arms again, and Harry dropped his ridiculous train of thought long enough to wonder if Snape was stowing a wand in his robes now instead of a side pocket. It would certainly have been more accessible in a sleeve sheath.

And while the hexing hadn't happened yet, that didn't mean that it _wouldn't_ happen. Most of the time, the best moment to strike was in the denouement.

"Imagine a man, who has spent most of his life being hated, finally finding affection, respect, and _frightening sexual chemistry_ in a relationship with someone _considerably_ younger than himself," Snape hissed in the hallway, his eyes narrowed even as his posture hinted at nonchalance. "Imagine that after years of lying and antagonism, he and that young man are ready to share a quarters. A house, in fact. It has been decided. Deposits have been made. _Nonrefundable_ deposits. Boxes of _highly unstable_ potions ingredients have been packed—"

Harry backed up a step, because Snape's voice seemed to be a little more hostile than he'd anticipated dealing with. Then again, maybe he deserved it.

"Look, I—"

"And _then_ imagine that same older man coming home from his extremely stressful and unfulfilling job to find that his lover of over a year has decided to leave without taking anything."

Harry wondered if they would cause a scene. He was willing to bet that Snape was still not a scene-making kind of person.

So he spread his hands out in front of him in the international sign of surrender and took one step forward.

"Yeah, about all that. I can't explain that, not in any way that would be remotely acceptable. But you see—" He lowered his hands a fraction. "Frightening sexual chemistry?"

Snape turned on his heel and strode down the hallway away from him. "I threw out all of your Muggle record albums. Oh, and do enjoy Gryffindor Tower." He turned towards Harry fully then, still walking backwards. He did that sometimes, as if he was simply in too big a hurry to bother to stop. Harry thought sometimes that Snape liked to show off freakish physical talents in intimidating ways. "The house-elves have _special_ instructions for the treatment of your bed."

Snape disappeared around a corner, and Harry was fairly sure that if he had followed he would have been soundly cursed. Instead, he headed in the opposite direction, to the front doors of the castle.

"Harry," came a voice from behind him, and Harry barely had time to register his name before Ron caught him by the shoulder. He should have known better, because Harry grasped his wrist and twisted, the flat of his other hand coming in for the face before he realised what he'd almost done. Hermione shouted and drew her wand, but before it was fully out Harry had released Ron and they all stood there, slightly out of breath. Harry's heart managed to calm itself a little, and Ron gave him a sheepish look. Hermione had one hand on her swollen stomach, the other gripping her wand, and her face was irate.

"Sorry mate," Ron said, apparently over his embarrassment and now working on amusement. "I guess I should have known better."

"I should say so!" Hermione admonished before lunging for Harry to wrap her arms about his neck and kiss him soundly on the cheek. "When did you get in? Where are you staying? Who else is here?"

Harry hugged her as much as physically possible and answered her questions as quickly as he could. Ron hung back, and despite the smile on his face, when his eyes met Harry's they were colder, evaluating, as if he was thinking of something more than reunion. Harry wondered if perhaps Ron was here on business too; then he wondered if that would curtail _his_ business. Worst case scenarios played in his head, and in the end, Harry decided that the worst case scenario was probably standing right in front of him, armed and dangerous, which of course, Ron most certainly was.

Hermione released him finally, and Harry realised when he pulled away how much he missed her smell. She smelled like mint and lavender and something else, something that had to do with books or ink. But she'd started to smell that way around their fourth year, or maybe he'd started to notice it in their fourth year. Harry sometimes wondered how many things he missed and never even knew it. Or was that the human condition? It was a mystery.

Hermione raised her eyebrow critically, and a comma of hair fell into her eye. "So? Have you seen him yet?" she asked, one corner of her mouth turned up in either humor or concern. Like Ron's, her expressions became more cryptic with age. Or possibly because Harry had seen her only once a year for the past three years. Visits to The Winchester aside, Harry made a point not to see them very much. He didn't know why; it just seemed like the right thing to do.

And some small part of him, deep down inside, was vaguely angry that they'd gone along with it.

Ron cocked his head and smiled at Harry over her shoulder. "Yeah, Harry, has he hexed you yet?"

"Of course he hasn't Ron, would he be standing here if he had?" Hermione replied, looking Harry up and down. "Well, I guess the parts he'd be cursing wouldn't necessarily be visible..."

Harry stared at her dully. "I hate you."

***

Hermione lay on one of the Gryffindor blankets with her eyes closed. Harry didn't like sitting this close to her, not because of some sort of discomfort with her, but because he thought that if someone wanted to shoot at him, they could miss and hit her. He'd long got used to the increasingly creepy turn his thoughts took in every scenario, but today he had to close his eyes and center himself every time to banish the pictures of what could happen.

Ron lounged on the red blanket next to Hermione, propped up on two arms, but his eyes, while squinted, screened the area unceasingly. Harry ripped up a few blades of grass, selected the best one, and made a whistle from it. Ron smiled faintly, and Hermione opened her eyes for a split second before closing them again.

"I should be proofing those Herbertson-Cleever papers," she said, not moving one inch.

"No," Ron told her, also not moving. Harry tossed the grass off the blanket and wondered how to play 'what all is a weapon' on a large expanse of grass with nothing else on it but his friends.

"They're due Tuesday," Hermione returned.

"No," Ron said again, "I took them out of your suitcase."

"I know," she replied, "I put them back in again."

Ron smiled at her. "And I took them out again."

Hermione opened one eye and turned her head minutely to look at Ron, before closing her eye again and half smiling. "Curses. Foiled again."

Harry was having trouble being there with them. Every cloud that shadowed him made him look up. He scanned the windows of the castle for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Every bird call or shout from a classmate across the green made him twitch. Finally, he rose and looked down at his friends.

"I'm going back down to Hogsmeade," he said, dusting his trousers off. "You want anything?"

Hermione shielded her eyes from the sun as she looked at him. "A Chocolate Frog," she said after a few seconds of consideration. Ron made a cutting gesture to indicate that he was completely content.

Harry raised an eyebrow at the irony of the role reversal. "Only one?"

"Well, I _want_ about thirty, but that's not quite me talking, you know? One will do. Oh and Harry," she called as he turned to start down the green.

"Yeah?"

"Remember that Snape's house is warded."

***

Hogsmeade didn't have brooms. Well, they did, but Harry didn't like them. He had intended to get a throwaway just for the weekend, but when he'd taken the handle from the saleswitch and hefted it experimentally, he'd felt a strange soreness in his chest and decided not to fly anywhere. He knew how to get across open cover safely, and if he made sure to walk with other people, he'd be fine.

He had promised to see Hermione and Ron at supper, and he wanted to walk around again to get some sort of sense of his bearings. Seamus wanted to get together at one of the pubs; he was probably the one who'd reserved the Phoenix Feather for that evening. Harry was sure that he would end up being the designated flier for the evening, and he wanted to think about it, get the lay of the land again, before he felt up to corralling a herd of drunken mates up the hill to Bedfordshire in the middle of the night.

And also he wanted to stalk Snape's house. _When you say it that way, it sounds rather dodgy,_ his voice of pragmatism remarked dryly. _Just pretend you're doing reconnaissance._

 _Oh, no,_ responded his voice of conscience. _Reconnaissance in your line of work is always a bad omen for the_ subject _of the reconnaissance. Just say you're curious as to what's happened to the house._

He _was_ curious about the house, and since his route to the Feather took him past it, well, then there was no harm in stopping. In the shrubs. Of the house across the lane.

The house looked very much the same since he had signed the papers for it years ago: little white fence, green shingled roof, and windows that needed a good scrubbing. Snape'd added green shutters. There was an extensive herb garden in the front that Harry had assumed Snape would have planted, because he had talked about it when they'd got the property in the first place.

Harry peered through the shrubs at the windows and wondered if Snape was home or still at the school. Did he stay there year round, or just in the summer months? Had he sold the Spinner's End property? Was that nosy lady who'd told them not to rent because of the Snorkacks in the ceiling tiles still living in the very house whose yard he was trespassing upon? Harry glanced out back at the house behind him to see the same old lady taking pictures of him with a camera.

***

The pub was free of old ladies, cameras, and the overwhelming sense that he was violating someone's privacy and/or trespassing. Harry slipped into the bar and pressed his back against the wall to one side, closing his eyes and breathing deep. Any minute, Jim would come out of the back and notice that he was there, and Harry could grill him for more information about the demise of the Shack, Snape, and the general welfare of Hogsmeade in general. If he hadn't been expected at dinner, Harry would have preferred to wile away the next few hours sitting in a booth in the deserted pub, listening to Jim rattle on and on about nothing in particular.

There was the sound of glass breaking far off to his right, and Harry dodged the first curse without thinking, diving behind the bar and rolling to the other end. He crawled behind a barrel and crouched, listening for human movement apart from the settling debris from the spell. Someone kicked either a table or a chair, probably to mask their movement in a different direction. Harry took the hint and moved away from the noise, coming to his feet in one movement, wand out. A _Crucio_ flew by his ear, followed in rapid succession by a volley of _Avada Kedavra_ s. Harry tossed about a few random incapacitating jinxes, his free hand groping in at his ankle holster when he crouched down behind the other end of the bar.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jim crouched in the doorway to the back of the bar. He tried to catch the barkeep's eye, to signal to go out the back entrance, but the man's eyes were screwed shut. _Figures,_ his voice of pragmatism gasped. _He's going to be hit._

Harry drew the .22 and switched hands with the wand; he could cast with both hands, but he could fire better with his right. Behind him there was the rattle of several chairs being picked up and tossed about.

"Come on, Rodolphus," he shouted, testing a theory, "it's been ten years. You can't still be mad." _Or alive,_ he added mentally. When there was no answer, he peeked over the bar to see Rodolphus cast another _Avada Kedavra_ in his direction before ducking behind an upsided table. Harry stood and fired the gun at Rodolphus, less concerned about aim and more concerned about getting as far from the door to the backroom as possible. He would have preferred to draw Rodolphus outside, however, it was impossible to know if he was alone. For a split second Harry missed having Ron for backup. This kind of shooting and fighting was too rare. Most of the time his targets didn't know they were going to die until he'd already done it; this kind of killing was more suited to the Ministry.

One of Rodolphus's counter-curses hit Harry's hand, grazing the knuckles, but it was enough to get him to fling his arm wide in shock, and the gun soared across the room to clatter in front of the door to the men's loo. Harry cursed and vaulted after it, casting a few spluttering _Stupefy_ s as he slid over the highly polished surface of the bar.

He waited, sure that Rodolphus's plan would be to wait for him to dive for the gun. Harry tried to Summon it, but apparently ' _Accio_ twenty-two' wasn't enough to get the weapon. He was about to try ' _Accio_ gun' and suffer the consequences of asking for something so generic when the front door banged shut. Harry rose for a second at the end of the bar in the corner, watching the windows in the front as Lestrange's figure whipped around the side of the building and into the forest that bordered the pub. It was rather confusing why he would want to leave now. Harry was winded, and his gun was temporarily missing, and he reached out for it with his hands, freezing at the all-too-familiar sound of hissing coming from the top of the bar.

Harry grabbed the gun, peeked over the top of the bar, and could only stare at the lump of Crak-A-Blast, the Wizarding equivalent of C4 that Fred and George had come up with late in the war, as its brightly coloured red fuse popped and hissed, shrinking towards the lump of magenta putty.

 _Oh._

Harry sprinted to the back door, barely stopping to snag Jim's arm and drag him through the backroom, past the kegs and casks, over a mountain of potatoes that must have just been delivered earlier, because they partially blocked the door. Harry scrambled over the pile of them, Jim finally coming to his senses and carrying himself over the obstructive tubers without any help.

Hoping that Jim was right behind him, Harry's feet pounded the packed dirt of the small compound behind the pub. Apparently he was, because Harry heard him manage to pant out something like "What the bloody he—" when the bar exploded, throwing them the last five feet to land in the grass. Harry's head smashed off a tree trunk and Jim let out a grunt that sounded like a bit of a scream.

The blast was deafening, but that was why Fred had named it _Crak-A-Blast_ , and George had dyed it magenta because that was the only colour that swam behind Harry's eyes as he closed them. Wood and glass showered them, and Harry covered Jim's head with his body when it came, a jagged flaming rain that must have made noise, but only sounded like he had held a seashell up to his ear.

Harry finally lowered his arms from his head and looked at the remains of the pub, what was left of the framework sticking up from the ground like spikes. Two feet from his face, the remains of the sign smoked, its letters scorched so that the only thing still readable was 'Phoeni.' Beside him, Jim moaned and cursed in several vibrant ways.

Harry couldn't have agreed more.

***

His ears still rang after supper, and Harry was sure that in the right environment, he could be persuaded to mishear anything. That being said, it seemed the best time to visit Snape. He left Ron and Hermione in the embrace of a large slice of chocolate gateau, most of which Hermione was eating by herself, and made his way down the hillside to Hogsmeade with the speed one could only acquire when they had finally resolved to nick a Cleansweep 12 from the Quidditch shed. Harry figured he'd return it later, and after the afternoon's explosion, there was no way in hell he was going to rely on his own feet for speed.

He had only knocked once on the door when it was answered. "You can't come in," Snape said quickly, his body blocking the door. He had changed from his formal robes to something less, less heavy. And green. And kind of tight about the chest and waist. And—

Harry wondered if Snape had planned this, oh wait, no, Snape wasn't like that.

"That's fine," Harry said, peeling his eyes from Snape's chest, "but you know how Mrs. Finch next door likes to take pictures with that little camera of hers and sell them to the _Prophet_ \--"

"You _can_ come in," Snape said finally, "but only so I'll have the pleasure of throwing you out." The corner of his mouth turned up in a sneer. "I was denied that experience eight years ago."

Harry managed to squeeze himself through the opening that Snape had allowed, then skirted out of Snape's way when the man brushed past him and into the sitting room. That was the international cue for 'follow; this way.' He smelled like anise, hyssop and lemon when he moved, and Harry wondered if, like Hermione, he had always smelled this way and Harry had just never noticed, or if this was a new revelation of the passage of time. It was suddenly ironic, then, that everything Harry had given up had suddenly attained scents of sweetness, and for a second he recalled the Muggle story of Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship for the passage of the Sirens.

Harry squared his shoulders, shoved his hands in his pockets for security reasons, and glanced out the windows to check if anyone was watching. When Snape's back was turned, he reached out and pulled a dark green curtain further across the window.

"Do you want a drink?" Snape asked, strolling to the sideboard and pouring himself a very generous finger of something from a decanter, probably brandy. Snape had always had a thing for brandy. Harry recalled suddenly a night when he had come home to find him naked, and there had been a crystal—

"No," he said shaking his head. "No, I don't drink."

Snape replaced the stopper in the decanter and picked it up, along with his glass. Harry noted that he had never even retrieved a second glass for Harry. "How very monastic of you." Snape motioned to a chair on the opposite side of the sitting room. "Have a seat. I think they were your chairs anyway."

"I bought them for you," Harry said softly while he took the one that looked considerably less worn than the one Snape chose to settle himself into. He watched Snape sip his brandy at first, a steady sip that emptied the glass considerably. Either Snape had built up a tolerance to alcohol or he was in the mood to get drunk. The latter could have either been very beneficial or detrimental to Harry's cause.

"So," Snape said finally, crossing one leg over the other. "Still working for the Ministry?"

Harry drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. "No. I left them a long time ago."

Snape tapped his chin, eyes raised to the ceiling as if in thought. "Is there anyone who hasn't felt the sting of your rejection?" He didn't let Harry answer, not that he had an answer, and instead poured himself a finger more of brandy, continuing what was most assuredly going to be a grand inquisition. Harry had a bit of experience with torture, so he was fairly sure he could fake it. "Where have you been?"

"All over."

"Rediscovering yourself? Isn't that what the whiny navel-gazing privileged elite children call it these days?"

"Not so much, no."

"Hn. So what have you been doing?"

"Cauldron inspector." Somehow, it sounded more evasive and less cheeky than he had meant it to.

Snape's eyes narrowed. "You'll have to try better than that."

"Really." When Snape didn't reply, but instead sipped from his glass, his eyes unwavering, Harry cursed inwardly. "Cursebreaker for Gringotts," he capitulated. "In Canada," he added hastily to avoid questions about Bill Weasley.

Snape tilted his head. For a second Harry was sure that he'd bought it. "And do you have a girlfriend who lives in Canada?"

Harry frowned for a second before he caught the more nuanced accusation in the question. "You know, this whole thing has started off fairly hostile, and I don't think that's going to help us resolve our issues." He broke his gaze away from Snape's eyes and stared at the fireplace instead. "That is—if you feel as if you could _want_ to resolve those issues."

"The only issue would be your bizarre sense of entitlement after perpetrating a heinous act of abandonment," Snape said bitterly. "Not that I'm very bitter about it, you see."

"Of course not."

"Fine," Snape said, slamming his glass down on the table. "I am quite bitter."

Harry glanced at the curtains, which were still slightly open. His fingers itched to close them. "What about you? Headmaster?"

Snape sighed. "Minerva had to retire sometime. The board was going to hire Sinistra, but she took a sabbatical." He rolled the brandy in the glass. "Just as well, I suppose. It's easier to be a Headmaster than a teacher. I have plenty of free time to publish." He paused. "It does explain how Albus had so much spare time to nose about in everyone's lives."

Harry thought about the portrait and wondered just how much advice Albus was giving Snape. "Right. So, publishing, that's good, right? And you kept the house, so that's also good. Healthy even..." he drifted off when he became increasingly aware of how slightly murderous Snape's gaze had become.

"It's curious that you feel comfortable breezing in here as if nothing amiss happened between us," Snape said, his brows knitting. "For three years I regularly turned Shacklebolt's office inside out, convinced that you were either dead, or missing, or brainwashed by a vampire kiss and hidden in a dungeon somewhere." He glared at Harry before scoffing, almost to himself. "For a while I was even sure that Shacklebolt had placed you in the Unspeakable department, doing God knows what to God knows whom."

Harry took a deep breath and stood; he was sure he deserved the lashing Snape looked ready to inflict, but he decided that he at least needed to be standing to do so. "I wish it was something easy to say," he murmured. "I truly don't have an answer for any of it. Not one that I can give you, anyway." A pause, in which neither of them said anything.

Finally, Snape shrugged. "I convinced myself that it was my fault, and I think I hate you for that."

Harry closed his eyes. "I deserve that." The clinking of the glass told him that Snape had finally relinquished his brandy momentarily, probably to get his wand and separate Harry from delicate parts of his anatomy. "It's complicated to say."

"By all means, Potter, try. You were never one for eloquence to begin with, so it's not as if you'd be shattering my expectations."

Harry ran his hands through his hair. It was rather promising that Snape hadn't hexed him yet and converted his body into garden fertiliser. "Well, actually, it's rather like...when I left you...I was realizing something for the first time in my life, you see, and you didn't have to do anything with it—"

"With your life," Snape said in a low monotone.

"No no no, with the decision, with the thing that...and then the other thing...and then the...." Harry's hands flailed. "I'm not making sense here."

Snape rolled his eyes and poured himself another finger of brandy. But he didn't tell Harry to leave, so that was a good sign. Or, Harry realised, a ridiculously bad sign.

Harry paced the room, which was never very large to begin with, despite the fact that when they'd rented it, it had seemed huge. After the cramped quarters they had been sharing at the castle, anything had seemed huge, actually. Snape's bookshelves took a foot width perimeter from the dimensions of it, and the fact that everything was dark and green didn't help.

"Can't we just...oh, I don't know, can't we just—"

"Have sex?" Snape asked, his face expectant.

Harry lowered his hands, froze, and wondered what dimension he'd just shifted into.

"Really?"

Snape finished the brandy and stood. "No."

"Oh. Okay then."

"You actually thought I'd be up for that?"

Harry had no answer for him. Not one that would get him out of here with all his limbs intact.

But Snape saved him the trouble of massacring even more words by striding past him to the front door, opening it and gesturing with a nod of his head. "I believe you know the way, _Mister_ Potter."

Harry thought to let it all out then and there: _I left because I was tired of being the Boy Who Killed For Other People. I left because I was afraid that you would hate me for what I was going to do. I left because I thought you would have a better go of it without me always overshadowing you. I left because I was indescribably, horrifically, fantastically frightened of what was to come of us._

I left because killing people was easy.

But the door was an even easier way to say everything that he didn't mean, everything that was safe to say, and so he went through it instead.

***

TRANS-ATLANTIC IMPORT/EXPORTS, INC., LONDON:

Angelina tapped the keyboard and leaned her head on her hand. "Burninating the countryside," she sang in her best gravelly voice, "burninating the peasants." On the screen, Trogdor the dragon ignited a few huts and the little pixellated people ran about, waving their arms. She was on level bajillion, and she was bored.

Had she known that she would be here waiting for Harry until zero dark thirty, she would have logged on and got into it with the guild. But instead she was sitting about, playing Trogdor the Burninator with her left and right buttons, listening to her own mangled singing, and to add insult to injury, missing her date. Plus, her thong was digging into her bum, and she was regretting that she'd even worn it. At this rate, Fred wouldn't even get to see it if she couldn't get out of here soon.

The line finally pulsed. Angelina picked it up and hit the space bar to pause her game. "Sir? Having fun?"

Harry sighed. "I blew up a pub. What have you got for me?"

Angelina shook her head and smoothed what were starting to look like permanent wrinkles on her dress. This dress was made to be taken off, not to be sitting around the office in. "You have trouble," she said. Where was the file? Ah, here, under her very expensive Madam Arianna designer handbag, which she was not using on her non-existent date.

"Really." Harry didn't sound interested.

"Actually, yes, sir. There's heightened Ministry chatter through the usual channels, and it all revolves around Hogsmeade. But that's because you already did it, right?" Harry didn't answer her. Angelina rolled her eyes. "Sir, are you going to do the—"

"Yes," Harry snapped. "I'm on prep work." Angelina smirked and unrolled the scroll in front of her.

"Well, all right. I think, and you can't take this as actual fact, but I think that Confidential might be upset with you. He snapped up three contracts all for the same day, and unless he has three bodies—"

Harry snorted. "Oh, didn't I tell you? We're supposed to unionise now."

Angelina tapped her fingers on the desk. She'd already heard something like this a few days ago, and she wasn't quite keen on having to work with Confidential's booking secretary, Camille. Camille was a cranky bitch who liked file tabs too much, whereas Angelina was a cranky bitch who thought filing was for occupations in which it wasn't incriminating to leave a paper trail of transactions.

"Okay, then," she said, cutting off what she figured would be Harry's tongue-in-cheek description about how they were all supposed to kill in a yellow submarine from now on. "That explains that. But if I have this correctly, Confidential lost the bidding for the Hogsmeade job. Do you think he'd send someone to do it anyway?"

Harry was careful to answer, Angelina could tell that the idea had just occurred to him for the first time, and he was as disturbed that he hadn't thought of it as he was by the actual idea itself. "Probably."

Angelina closed her eyes and counted to ten. Sometimes she thought that she could do Harry's job better than he could. However, then she'd have to be the one out there and he'd be the one on the World of Warcraft boards with her gnome mage.

"What about my mystery face?"

"Well, I couldn't find much, sir. However, you were right; the Lestranges are there."

Harry choked on whatever he was drinking. "Lestranges? As in Rudolphus and Bellatrix?"

Angelina gritted her teeth and smiled, clicking her nails on the countertop. "I wasn't talking about George and Fred Lestrange," she said dryly.

"I thought Bellatrix was dead," he muttered.

"I suspect she got better," Angelina offered snappishly, "sir."

"Why don't Dark wizards ever _stay_ dead?"

"I think they're in a union," she said breezily. Sometimes Harry was too easy.

Harry paused. "We could take this on the road."

Angelina smiled and shut down her computer. "Have a good time sir." Sometimes he just needed a good kick in the arse.

***

HOGWARTS:

The bed was ice-goddamn-fucking-bloody-cold. Harry watched Ron, Neville, the just-arrived Dean, and Seamus drunkenly slide into their beds with contented sighs (once they had all got over the surreal strangeness of seemingly going back in time ten years and an impromptu wrestling match between Dean and Seamus that Harry had needed to break up), their faces betraying no sign of tampered freezing beds. The minute his toes had hit the sheets, he had started to shiver. Snape must have been thinking these things up for weeks, or years.

 _Of course he's mad, you complete idiot,_ Harry's voice of conscience told him. _You left him in the lurch and never bothered to contact him._

And so, here Harry was, standing outside Snape's office, trying to crack the password of a stone gargoyle. It wasn't as if he was going to be able to sleep in a room full of other people, anyway. Why he hadn't taken a room at the Three Broomsticks, or better yet, the Hog's Head, currently mystified him.

"Boomslang Skin," Harry muttered. "Dumbledore. Chinese Fireball. The Ramones."

The stone gargoyle refused to move. Its arms crossed and if it could, it probably would have tapped an impatient toe.

Harry sighed. He'd gone through all of Snape's favored passwords. And the lesser known ones. And the general words that he favored, such as 'incompetent,' 'dunderhead,' and 'delinquent.' No success. Then he had started on random words that he associated with Snape, such as 'sadism,' 'ethically-challenged,' and finally 'aubergine.'

The gargoyle widened its eyes. "Aubergine? Are you trying to get in or redecorate?" If Harry hadn't been so sure that the castle had the only control on charmed statues, he would have been convinced that Snape had somehow overwritten the gargoyle's personality with his own.

Harry glanced about. This was not the rather stealthy trip he'd planned to make. "Oh come on, uhm, _Sectumsempra_ , uh, Death to Weasleys, uh, Half-Blood Prince—"

The gargoyle rolled its eyes and uncrossed its arms as the entire stone edifice receded back and the twisting stone staircase descended. Harry sighed. Sometimes he worried about Snape.

The Headmaster's office was dark, but when Harry entered, torches lit themselves, and he was surprised, not because the place was self-lit, but because he hadn't jumped. Harry looked at the portraits of Headmasters in various stages of sleep, some of them coming awake, most of them still soundly snoring. Snape probably came and went at all hours.

Phineas was pretending to be asleep, and even if he wasn't, Harry didn't much care. He cast a _Muffliato_ and then the small spell that gaoled the former Headmaster in his portrait, and waited for a second before tapping at the frame with his finger.

"Phineas?"

The man in the portrait sighed. "I suppose I've erred by pretending to sleep too often in front of you." He opened his eyes and focused their sharp blackness on Harry. "What is it that gives me away?"

"You snore when you're truly asleep." Harry glanced about and wondered how much in the room he could touch without giving his presence away to the owner. Could he sit in the chair? Could he touch the robes hanging in the corner? Did they smell like anise and hyssop as well? And lining the shelves were those journals in Snape's steady script. Harry could pull the one he wanted from the shelf and see what Snape had written when he'd--

On second thought, this was _Snape's_ office, and touching anything in his office while he was absent was probably like playing musical chairs with a polar bear: sure it was interesting, but in the end somebody was getting mauled without warning. Not a fan of the mauling, Harry backpedaled to stand directly in front of the painting and ignore the stares of the other Professors.

"So, I saw him, and I'm not sure what happened," Harry said.

Phineas removed his nightstocking and looked peeved. "Whatever makes you think that I could ever help you with Severus Snape? Or in any relationship, for that matter?" He waved a hand. "That is the man to see over there." Harry followed his gaze to Dumbledore's portrait, in which the wizard was sitting back in a chair reading from a large book. So far he hadn't bothered to look up, but Harry knew he was aware of his presence. Harry glanced back at Phineas, who had donned his cap again and made a shooing gesture with his hand. Harry cancelled the spell on the portrait and the _Muffliato_ and watched Phineas dart out of the frame, presumably to get more peaceful sleep in the quiet of Grimmauld Place.

Dumbledore didn't look any different than he had when Harry had last seen the painting, not physically, but when he looked up at Harry's approaching form, he thought he detected a little frown from the former Headmaster.

Dumbledore's portrait had been modified, expanded a bit to include a comfortable looking armchair and a stack of books. Dumbledore's robes were still purple and gold, and his hat was still askew on his head. He peered at Harry over a pair of spectacles.

Finally he lowered the book and smiled. "Harry, I thought I'd never see you again."

Harry leaned against the edge of the desk and glanced down at his feet. "That was my intention, Sir."

Dumbledore nodded. "I know. Phineas has never been good at keeping secrets." He closed the book. "Now, how have you been?"

Harry sighed into his hands, running them across his face and into his hair. "Snape hates me."

Dumbledore nodded, his face a mask of seriousness. "Yes, yes he does."

Harry let go of his hair and stared at the painting. "Seriously?"

Dumbledore's smile reappeared. "No, Harry, not hate, but something akin to it, I fear. You should have told him what you were going to do."

Harry settled further onto the edge of the desk and tested it for his weight. It held, and so he slid onto the polished surface of it. "Who can say that to someone they love? 'Oh, hallo, how was your day? By the way, I'm tired of the Minister of Magic sending me out to kill people, so I think I'll just open my own very lucrative business in assassination.'" He gestured wildly with his hands.

Dumbledore's smile vanished and he gazed sternly at Harry over his spectacles. For a second Harry believed that he was right in the room with him, not dead in the tomb outside, some semblance of him trapped in a painting. "I gather that wasn't exactly what it was when you left initially."

Harry shrugged. "I wasn't quite thinking about it when I left. I was thinking something to the effect of 'what have I been doing?' and also 'how could I do this to people?' and then I came home one night and realised while we were sitting there at dinner that if things hadn't gone the way they _had_ , it could have been him, you know? It could have been him and I would have never..." Harry trailed off and stared at the clock on one of the many bookshelves. It read two forty-three in the morning.

"You could have been sent to kill him," Dumbledore finished for him. He took off his spectacles and folded them, burying them in the sleeve of his robes. "I won't lie to you and say that I don't think you made a mistake, Harry, several mistakes."

This would have been so much easier with Phineas. "I know, I know, but if it makes anyone feel any better, I think I've lost my taste for it." He glanced at some of the Muggle book titles on the shelves; Snape had been serious when he had admitted his boredom. He wondered if they had been gifts from Hermione; every year she sent him a book for Christmas. He had about five years' worth that he'd never touched.

Dumbledore favored him with another smile. "Then perhaps this anniversary will provide a more profound urgency for you to, as Miss Brown so poorly put it in her invitation, 'polish off the promise of the future.'"

Harry stared at him dully. "You did not just quote Lavender Brown at me."

Dumbledore's face reddened slightly. "Quite without thinking about it. Thank goodness Phineas isn't here; I would never hear the end of it."

***

Snape was still up; his lights were on. Harry used the scope to see the house before he made the trek across the village from the gates. Snape peered through the curtained window before opening the door, but this time he didn't let Harry in. That was just fine; he could say what he had worked out with Dumbledore from the doormat just as easily as from an armchair.

"Here's the thing," Harry said suddenly, letting the flat of his palm rest on the door itself, as if he might push it in. "I think, and you know that I'm right, that we had something, and that there's a lot more to this situation, and I can't just vomit it up on command at a moment's notice."

Snape tilted his head. "Thank you for...not vomiting."

Harry ignored him, though he was faintly aware that what he had practiced with Albus was not quite what was coming from his mouth. No matter; he was fuelled by a shot of firewhisky from Snape's office and also a bit of the headiness he retained from a breakneck trip across the grounds. "So here's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking that we should go to the reunion ball tomorrow night together, and here's why. One," he raised a finger, "because that way we can fend off people we don't want to talk to—"

Snape smiled a little bit, and Harry was sure he was getting to him. He used to do this sort of filibustering all the time when they had been together, and it had had a sixty percent success rate, eighty if he was naked, and for Snape, that had been a pretty good percentage.

"What if you're the one I don't want to talk to?"

Harry stopped and gave him a sarcastic look, then barrelled on. "Two, because we can talk there, and D, because they have alcohol."

Snape stopped smiling. "That's three. And also, Potter, it's not _my_ reunion, remember?"

For one second, Harry entertained thoughts about complementing Snape's visage by denying his age in a most flattering and wholly unrealistic way, but then remembered that he wasn't going to get anywhere with more lying. And also, he was trying to score, here. Just a bit.

"I owe you an explanation."

Snape narrowed his eyes. "Yes. Yes you do."

Harry smiled. "We'll be in public, and the urge to do each other physical harm will be minimised greatly," he finished. "I think that was number four." He paused. "Possibly letter E."

Snape moved a step back but didn't relinquish his vice grip on the door. "I'll admit that I'm curious to see how the years have damaged you," he said cautiously.

Harry backed away from the door and grinned. "Seven. Tomorrow. Right here."

Snape rolled his eyes. "I won't hold my breath. Good night, Mister Potter."

Harry continued to back away from the door, his smile still painted on his face, but something in the way Snape had said his name hooked a bit of doubt inside him.

***

 **ACT III:**

 _I'd like to kiss you, I'd love you hold you  
I ain't got no time for that now_  
(Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime")

Breakfast had been quick and easy to bear, since Ron had made himself super useful in fending off the occasional classmate who couldn't resist the urge to chat up Harry Potter. One by one they came up to the table, and like a hired thug, Ron skulked a bit and hunched and in general looked menacing, and Harry played the part of the aloof Godfather whom no one was allowed to talk to. Hermione simply ignored them both and read the paper while devouring a breakfast of eggs and what appeared to be a tower of fruit.

After a while, it seemed that word had got round that Harry wasn't talking to anyone, probably because he was an egotistical git, and people stopped coming to the table. If Harry cared anymore what people thought, he might have felt rather poorly about his new reputation as a complete prick, but to be honest, he'd been done since the time thirty minutes ago, when Ernie Macmillan had jostled up next to him and said, 'So, anyone polishing your wand these days, eh, Potter?'

Harry was completely content to fade into the background of the rest of the reunion, but his blending in technique was fouled when the giant owl flew in and circled the hall about five times before it swooped down to drop a note into Harry's hands. Well, if everyone in the hall hadn't known he was present before, they certainly did now; it seemed that he was the only one to be receiving owl post this morning. Harry examined at the spidery red writing on the envelope and knew instantly that he would want to read it in private.

He excused himself, and with the familiar feeling of being the center of attention sneaking back to him, slinked out of the great hall as stealthily as possible for one who was being watched by everyone in the room, which was to say, not very. Harry turned back to the room to see at least two dozen heads whip away from him to study their breakfasts, or the person across from them, or the ceiling.

The jig was up. Harry waved the letter and cleared his throat. "I've got post," he said loudly, and a few of the people who were steadfastly _not_ looking at him were justified in staring directly at him again. "I'm going to go read it in private, and then I think I'm going to Hogsmeade and then I might take a nap," he finished. "Just in case you need to plan around it."

No one said anything, but Harry couldn't repress a smile and a skip in his step when he ducked down the hallway and into a deserted alcove.

There was only one person who could send him a letter like this. Only a few people even knew he was here, and since most of them were actually _here_ there was no need to send him a letter. That left Angelina, who would never send post and actually hated sending it to begin with, and the other person. Harry slit the envelope open with a pocketknife.

>   
> _Mister Potter,_   
> 

  


>   
> _I do hope that you have given appropriate thought to our proposal. I realise that our last meeting was rather harsh and abrupt, and I would hate to see you make a mistake predicated on unnecessary stubbornness and a burgeoning sense of false-independence._   
> 

  


>   
> _As of this moment, our organisation cannot allow you to continue to freelance in the British Isles; we have conferred, and are all in agreement that any open contracts you have are null and void until you see fit to sign on. There is a way things should be done, and surely you can see that._   
> 

  


>   
> _C._   
> 

Harry held the note up to one of the wall sconces and set it aflame. Confidential wanted war? Harry would...well, Harry would think about sticking it to him later. For now, he had a visit to make.

Hermione caught up with him at the entrance to the grounds. "Ron will meet us there," she said breathlessly, waddling a little when she walked. Harry wanted to ask her if that happened with every pregnancy, but some sort of sense of self-preservation stopped him. "Something about owling the Ministry." She frowned. "They can never let go of him."

Harry shrugged. It wasn't that the Ministry was evil, Shacklebolt certainly wasn't, but there was a certain level of need-to-know business about what it took to start up a government after a complete regime change, and Harry had long come to understand that governing was one of those things that, like sausages, no one wanted to see being made. He didn't actually have to explain this to Hermione—she was a lawyer.

They were halfway down the green to Hagrid's hut when Harry spied a set of familiar acid green robes and head of blonde curls bobbing in their direction. Hermione muttered something very unseemly under her breath.

"I'm sorry, Harry," she said, "she was bound to show up sooner or later."

Harry sighed and watched Rita Skeeter tromp across the lawn, admiring her tenacity and marvelling that she still wore that hideous colour. "Why does she even care? Am I still that big a story? I've dropped off the map and the Ministry is running fine without me."

Hermione blinked at him. "Harry, you will always be the story," she said, almost tripping on a rock and grabbing onto Harry's arm to steady herself. There was a snap as Skeeter's photographer took a picture of Hermione's near fall. "Oh, good, we'll be the front page again," she remarked dryly.

Harry smirked, and there was another snap of the shutter. " _Harry Potter and Hermione Granger-Weasley: Best Friends in_ Every _Way?_ "

Hermione laughed. "Seriously, I'm sure the idea of the whole DA back for the reunion was too much for her to resist."

Harry watched Skeeter nearly make it to them before she was accosted by a gushing fan who wanted her autograph; that was almost laughable. "Not all of the DA was in our year, though."

"You don't know?" Hermione said softly as they watched the woman jog in their general direction. "Since it's the anniversary of the battle, our class decided to invite the remaining members of the DA, despite when they left school." She smirked. "Angelina didn't tell you?"

Harry resigned himself to being accosted by Skeeter. "Angelina, I am discovering, was rather mum on several aspects of this weekend."

Hermione grabbed his hand. "If we can make it to the gates we can Apparate," she said helpfully. "Or we can go the other way and hope that Hagrid scares her away."

Harry pulled her to the left as gently as he could. "Hagrid. But only because I want to see the look on her face when he unleashes that new dog he's been talking about."

Hermione grinned wickedly, and Skeeter called Harry's name as he turned away from her to start a new route. "I wonder if Hagrid's new dog eats beetles."

***

Harry stood in front of the mirror in the prefect's bathroom and ran a hand through his hair. All of the others were perfectly happy to use the dormitory bathroom to get ready for the party, but Harry had become rather wary of being around other people while bathing, especially since the only weapon he could carry on him into the bathtub or shower was a long handled diver knife strapped to his leg. He didn't want to have to answer the inevitable questions of 'What's up with the knife, Harry?' or 'You just happy to see me or is that...?' It was just easier to bathe and dress for the reunion ball in the prefects' bathroom, which no one seemed keen on using despite its monstrously huge bathtub. Harry did not avail himself of the taps of bubbles and coloured soaps as he had in his fourth year. Instead, he ran enough water for a cursory but thorough wash, prayed that Myrtle was distracted elsewhere, and shaved and dressed as quickly as he could when distracted by the bathroom's animated mermaid.

Harry buttoned the inner vest of his dress robes as he talked himself into a better persona than the one he really was.

"Yeah, I sell gnome insurance." He winked. "Oh, not much , been travelling the world, looking for Nargles." The mirror coughed a bit, but Harry ignored it. "Me? Oh, yes, I lobby for equal rights for Blast-Ended Skrewts. I teach underwater basketweaving at Durmstrang." He pulled on the outer robe, wondering how he had let Madam Malkin talk him into something so loose. He was wearing a deathtrap. Harry transfigured his outer robes into something more akin to a leather duster. Sometimes, Muggles had the right idea.

"In my spare time," he told the mirror as he buckled one of his boots and slid his trouser leg over it, "I like to read classic Muggle literature to giants."

Harry held the grip of the gun in his hand and considered it carefully. The gun was a big deal to take, and if he were caught with it, he'd have precious few excuses to have it, especially if Ron caught him. He finally abandoned the weapon and woefully thought of his .22, saved from the Phoenix Feather only to be blown from his hand by the explosion. Harry hadn't stayed around to look for it and hadn't been able to Summon it either, though why was still a mystery.

So, no gun. _You should take down the date and time, because this is a turning point,_ his voice of conscience said.

 _By all means, take down the date and time,_ his voice of pragmatism replied, _because this is the beginning of your downfall._ Harry stood in the silence for a minute, ignoring the fluttering movements of the mermaid, weighing options in his hands almost literally.

 _On one hand,_ said the voice of conscience, _going weaponless would be a great way to ease into civilian life. And if, later in the evening, you were to be in a situation in which a certain someone would be removing your clothing, then you'd have nothing to explain away._

 _On the_ other _hand,_ his voice of pragmatism said smugly, _if I was trying to kill another assassin, I'd use the distraction of a party to mask my movements. I'd count on him to be un or under armed because of his familiarity with his surroundings._

On the other hand, though...

"No," Harry said to the mirror, "there is no other hand." He packed the gun back into the weapons case, but retrieved and added three knives to his person, one on each leg (accessible by sticking his hands through holes in his pockets) and another to his forearm. It was as close to a compromise as he was going to get. He straightened his dark green robes again, ran his hands through his hair, and stared at his face in the mirror.

"My name is Harry Potter. I'm not married, not dating, don't have any kids, and if someone paid me enough money, I'd curse your head off."

The mirror sniffed disdainfully. "Well, _finally_ , some honesty around here."

***

Harry knew he was late. Not only did he have a watch, a winding analog wristwatch that worked in both worlds, but also he could tell by the nagging feeling in his gut that told him that the worst would always happen to him. He had decided not to use the broom, mostly because he would have had to leave it at Snape's, for the other man would never consent to getting on a broom with him.

So, in between being accosted by the Rita Skeeter squad and nearly hexing them on the lawn, he had also cancelled a spontaneous trip to see Dumbledore's portrait, mostly because he was panicked a little. "Last month, you killed a man with a fork, and you can't do this," Harry muttered to himself.

 _You know, Skeeter can make herself into a one-inch wide beetle,_ his voice of pragmatism said ruefully, _so maybe now isn't the best time to be admitting to first degree murder._

Harry bit both lips together and continued to trudge down the hill to the gates. He had played with the idea of bringing flowers, but the only place to get them was from Neville's greenhouse, and Harry had the sneaking suspicion that if he went in there he'd end up having to slaughter a Fanged Geranium or Venomous Tentacula. And he'd just bought these robes. So instead, he carried a small pouch with some Asphodel Root and a few bezoars as a gift; Harry might not have seen Snape in almost a decade, but he had known what made the made the man tick when they had been together.

Snape was already walking through the gates of Hogwarts by the time Harry reached them, his dress robes whipping in the May wind, his hair coming loose from its tail and dragging across his face. His outer robes flew back behind him like a cape, and Harry blinked a few times at the lean legs encased in their trousers, the short trim vest of combed black velvet and the small chain that most assuredly led to a watch tucked into a breast pocket. His attention was directed towards his feet, probably because he had been ignoring the path and instead preferred, as he always had, to take a straight line up to the castle instead of the wandering path, a trail that should have been worn into the grass by now. Harry smiled in spite of himself and shoved his hands into his pockets.

"You couldn't wait for me at the house," he said over the wind, and Snape's head snapped up.

"You were late," he replied curtly, and in that moment Harry saw something dart across his face, something that looked like apprehension. It was fleeting and unfamiliar; Harry chose to ignore it.

"Yeah, about that—" He dug in his pocket and found the bag. "For you."

Snape took the bag dubiously, but slowed his pace as he opened it and peered inside at Harry's gifts. "A date rape drug and a poison remedy," he muttered dryly. "Come now Potter, you couldn't just get flowers?" He pocketed the bag anyway.

Harry shrugged. "Neville offered some honking daffodils."

Snape shook his head and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. Every step they took brought them closer to the reunion with its gaggles of people and Rita Skeeter and Lavender with her endless questions and rooms with no privacy and yearbooks and precious moments, and as he watched the curve of Snape's bent neck while they walked, Harry wondered what he might have said if Harry had suggested that they just turn right back around and get a room at the Broomsticks.

Instead, he braced himself for an evening of noise and smiling a great deal. "So, I'm sorry you had to meet me here," he said, deciding that an apology was a great way to start the evening.

Snape snorted. "I was actually going to be here anyway." His eyes caught Harry's. "You are window dressing on what is starting to look like yet another horrendous evening in the company of people who cannot seem to stay out of my life."

"So, you were coming up here anyway?" Harry kicked a stone and almost tripped over his dress shoe. Suddenly, his triumph of scoring a not-quite-a-date had dulled considerably. "Whatever for?" He didn't add that if he'd had less of a reason to be here, he'd already be in London.

Snape glanced at his ungraceful footwork, but he didn't smile or sneer. "As one of the summer caretakers of Hogwarts, I'm actually required to be present at events held there while school is not in session."

"Really? What could happen?"

"Two years ago, someone, who I will assume was a Weasley, managed to deposit sick up all over Filch's office."

Harry smiled. "I always thought you had a thing for Filch, you know."

Snape sighed and frustratedly pulled more escaped hair behind his ear. "I think, perhaps, you often forget that for decades I was also hated and feared." He favored Harry with a smile, though it wasn't entirely free of poison. "I'm sure I still am, though with a marked emphasis on the fear and less on the hated part now."

Harry smiled, trying to imitate Seamus's mouth-splitting grin. "Oh? Giving out sherbet lemons yet?"

"I'm still not completely wearing the idea that I shouldn't hex off your genitalia," Snape replied as they arrived at the doors of the castle, open and brightly lit. Some music band that had been popular ten years ago, possibly the Weird Sisters, blared from the Great Hall. Just inside the doors sat a long table, manned by who looked to be Lavender Brown and Hannah Abbott.

Harry brushed up against his shoulder then, so that his face was close to Snape's ear. "As long as you're thinking of that part of my body." He didn't allow Snape the chance to reply and instead sidled up to the table and waved at Lavender.

"Oh Harry!" Lavender sighed, smiling brightly. "It's me, Lavender!"

Harry decided to just stick the Seamus grin on permanently so that he wouldn't have to think about it. "Yes! I saw you at lunch today!" Hannah rolled her eyes at him and smirked while she sorted through a stack of paper tags.

Lavender ignored him to smile at Snape. "And Professor Snape! Do you remember me? I'm—"

Snape folded his arms and shifted into what Harry liked to call 'the unholy teacher stance': shoulders back, arms crossed, neck up, chin down, scowl ironed on, one foot slightly back. It was also rather similar to Snape's initial duelling position. "Miss Brown, if you think I could ever forget your stupifyingly ridiculous and utterly dismal failures at the most simple of potions during the brain-numbing five years in which I was forced to endure your mere presence, then you have even less matter in your skull than I thought was possible; I had assumed that people with that little of a brain were merely running on involuntary motor control."

Harry was glad that this mouth was already grinning, because really, he wouldn't have been able to mask the amusement otherwise. He patted Snape's shoulder and was rewarded when he wasn't immediately hexed.

"Oh, well then," Hannah said into the stunned silence. "We made name tags." She handed Harry his tag. "Lavender put all our nicknames on them, so that we would remember."

Harry looked at his tag. It said 'Potter.' Even better-- Snape's said 'Professor Snape.'

"Wow," he said to Hannah, whose nametag said "Nanna Banana.' It could have been a Hufflepuff thing, or maybe Lavender had made it up. Harry wanted desperately to see if Ron's tag said 'Won-Won.' "That's great."

As they left the table, Snape produced his wand and changed his nametag to read, 'Headmaster Snape,' but he didn't bother to put it on. Harry slipped his into his pocket and glanced about the Great Hall for familiar faces that he could stand to be around.

The Great Hall was festooned with waving streamers that looked capable of strangling people. Indeed, some people on the fringes of the room seemed to be having trouble keeping the streamers from creeping about their arms and necks. The ceiling was enchanted to look like the night sky as usual, but the stems of the buttresses had been lined with gold crepe, and the High Table had been transformed into a stage, similar to the way it had been at the Yule Ball in their fourth year. It was indeed the Wierd Sisters, looking a bit more worse for wear, pounding out some sort of tune that Harry suspected he would know, if he had paid more attention to those things when he had been in school, instead of fighting Voldemort.

 _Well, that was bitter,_ his voice of conscience told him.

"Oh, stuff it," he muttered, and then quickly covered his mumbling by turning to the man next to him. "What do you want to do?" he asked Snape, who was in the process of scowling at some dancers and trying to edge slightly towards one of the side exits.

"I'd like to close the doors and set the place on fire."

"So, a drink, then?"

"Yes."

Over in a far corner of the Great Hall, away from the band and dancers, Harry and Snape found the bar. Apparently they weren't the only people to think of imbibing heavily, since Seamus was already there, surrounded by a gaggle of women that Harry had to admit he'd never seen before in his life. Seamus hadn't been joking when he had described the fast and exciting world of product marketing. Perhaps Seamus had picked them all up at the pub-crawl last night.

Harry ordered a club soda for himself and a brandy for Snape and then the two of them walked stiffly away from the bar, mostly because Harry had seen Justin Finch-Fletchley heading in their direction with one of his many quills engraved with his firm's name, something tedious like _Graggduddle, Farthington, Spranger and Finch-Fletchley_. Last night Harry had taken the quill simply because he had been curious as to how they'd got all the names on it; the letters were just very small.

Snape ducked into a partial alcove and folded in on himself like a clamshell, or a bit of what Harry imagined a very antisocial clamshell would do if it could, and frowned. Harry leant against the pillar and sipped his drink. It was fizzy and tasteless.

"Thanks for coming," he said into the half darkness.

Snape's glass glinted in the light. "I'm obligated to be here." Harry suspected that this was going to be the mantra that got Snape through the night.

Harry's eyes scanned the crowd. "Yeah, where is Filch, anyway?"

"Probably setting bear traps outside his office. When he heard that the DA members were all returning, he almost had a seizure."

Harry smiled to himself and scanned the crowd again. If Angelina was here, he was going to have quite a bit of fun at her expense.

"Hey Harry," Hermione said from behind him, and he relaxed for a second before he realised that had let her sneak up on him. Not that he would have been happy to assault her, but part of him was unsettled by the turn of events. Harry let her take his glass and sniff it before drinking from it; ten years of being a Weasley had blurred her strict adherence to personal property in regards to family members. She made a face. "This is tasteless."

Behind her, Ron hung back, probably because he knew who was further back in the darkness. Harry rolled his eyes. "It's supposed to be tasteless," he said to her. _Because most of the popular fast-acting poisons are detectable by taste,_ he added in his head.

 _Except for iocane powder,_ his voice of pragmatism added. Harry resolved to never let Hermione drink from his glass ever again.

"Ms. Granger-Weasley, I would have thought that your manners would have improved with age," Snape said from the darkness, and Hermione raised her eyebrows. "Instead I find you—"

"Why, Headmaster," Hermione said brightly, "Here I thought I wasn't going to see you while we were here, but here you are. Ron, it's Headmaster Snape." Behind her, Ron nodded. "Thank you so much for giving up your valuable time to supervise the reunion." Snape drew breath to retort but she steamrollered right over him. "Oh look Ron, there's an open bar and Justin Finch-Fletchley! I bet he'll give us a quill without our even having to ask. Come on!"

Hermione left them, and Ron saluted Harry with two fingers and followed her. Harry turned to Snape. "Did she just--"

"Don't," came from the darkness.

Harry shrugged. "I'm going to go say hello to some people that—"

"Please," Snape said. "I need another drink before I'm quite ready to emerge from here." Harry backed away from the alcove, set his drink on a table and set off in search of no one in particular, though he thought to snag Ron and ask him if Ginny and Viktor were going to be there. Quidditch season was just heating up, and they might have had games elsewhere.

One corner of the Great Hall had been converted into a makeshift shrine, and without looking, Harry knew what he would see there: tables adorned with candles and images of those who had lost their lives at the Battle of Hogwarts, along with heartfelt condolences preserved in a memory book, probably. He purposefully avoided it, which was just as well, since it was swamped with people who fell over themselves to contribute their own thoughts in the open books that lay about.

Harry tried to tell himself that he'd visit the tables later, but he knew he was lying. He had nothing to say to the dead, and nothing he had done in the past eight years would have even come close to doing them justice.

Instead, Harry veered away from the crowds and into a small gathering of tables, towards a blonde head that he recognised. "Hey Luna."

Luna Lovegood turned her head to face him, her eyes brightening a bit when she saw him. "Oh Harry, it's you," she said, jostling something, and Harry rounded her chair to see the infant in her arms. Her face was still the same as it always had been, though gone were the radish earrings, probably because they were good targets for child yanking. The necklace remained the same, and the baby seemed to be enthralled with it, examining each individual cork with meticulous attention. Luna gazed at the child dreamily for a moment before looking back at Harry.

"I had wondered when you would show up." She blinked at him. "There were rumors that you'd been abducted by that roving cult of Umgubular Slashkilters, but I was fairly sure they were wrong. Everyone knows that Slashkilters don't agree on anything, and a whole group of them together would be impossible."

Harry sat in a chair across from her and leant his elbows on his knees. "Yeah," he agreed, deciding just not to get into it. "Is this your kid?"

Luna turned the child to face Harry, and he widened his eyes a bit at it. Like all babies, it was chubby and slightly genderless, especially given that Luna had dressed him or her in yellow, the colour of the sun, of course. "This is Lysander," she said animatedly, or as animatedly as Luna ever was.

"He's very small," Harry said, watching Luna bounce the baby on her knee.

Luna's face lost some of the dreaminess that he'd grown accustomed to seeing there, and she blinked. "Oh, I would think so. It wouldn't be right for people to burst out fully-grown, you know. Very confusing."

Harry reached out and held Lysander's hand. The baby smiled and said something unintelligible. Luna stared at Harry in most unsettling way, but what was probably just her normal stare. "So, uh," Harry said, "You got married, right? Kids, job, house." Luna simply blinked. "How's, uh, how's that working out for you?"

Luna smiled, and Lysander finally let go of Harry's hand, clapping his own together and saying something to the equivalent of 'loidyloidyloidy.' "Last week, Rolf and I managed to relocate an entire school of Plimpies from the Hogwarts Lake. None of them were of the Gulping variety, but still, the Merpeople tie their feet in knots. That's quite rude." Luna bounced Lysander and he made some sort of screeching noise. "Did you know that Plimpies have their own form of oral storytelling? Rolf has been learning some of the simpler tales."

Harry glanced about, looking for Snape, but the man was nowhere to be seen; he was probably still plastered to the darkened pillar on the other side of the Great Hall. This would have been a nice time to be rescued, like he had mentioned when originally selling the idea to Snape the night before.

"Harry," Luna said, "whatever you've been doing, it hasn't been good for you. Your halo reverberations are all wrong." Harry stiffened a little and sat back. He had no idea what 'halo reverberations' were, and while Luna often hit on things that were true in a way she didn't intend, this time was strangely odd.

On the other hand, three weeks ago in Mumbai a drunken cocktail waitress he'd been chatting up had said that his aura was sick, and he had ignored her, as well. What did that mean, anyway? But then again, despite Hermione's protestations, there was something to be said for hands-on healing and energy fields. What were wards anyway, but tuned energy fields? And then again, a ward was something that had been researched and harnessed, so that they were just as understandable as electrical currents or bacteria.

But on the other hand, just because it hadn't been researched thoroughly yet didn't mean that it couldn't exist. And if 'halo reverberations' or auras _were_ real, what did that say about Harry's? Was it sick? Was it weak? Could he cure it with therapy? Possibly a very good blowjob?

 _Wait,_ said an inner voice that Harry rarely listened to and wasn't even sure what it was, _are you_ actually _taking Luna Lovegood seriously? Think about that. Oh, and by the way, if you had that many hands, you'd be the goddess Kali Ma._

"Oh, uh, I'll take that under advisement," he mumbled.

Luna just shook her head.

***

There were reports that a certain Headmaster was skulking about in the rose garden, being ineffectively menacing, and so he thought he'd look into it, possibly save Snape from a drunken hexing, and then get him all alone. His plans were temporarily stalled when Ron sidled up to him, one hand in his pocket.

"Hey," Ron said sotto voce in his ear, "can you spare about three minutes? I promise I'll time it."

"Yeah," Harry replied, and turned back around to lean against the wall next to Ron. Kingsley had always told them that some of the most delicate business was best conducted in public, since people didn't expect it. The moment two people were witnessed huddling in a corner, whispering, the cat was out of the bag. Harry occasionally wondered why anyone would put a cat in a bag to begin with.

Blaise Zabini was doing something wholly inappropriate on the dance floor with Pansy. Ron made a face and shook his head. "I don't know if you heard," he said lightly, eyes focused on the other dancers across the hall. "Dawlish and his team just picked up Rodolphus Lestrange outside Hogsmeade. Something about blowing up that pub down there yesterday."

Harry shoved one hand into his pocket and made contact with the knife strapped to his leg. "Really? Isn't he supposed to be dead?"

Ron sucked in one cheek for a second before answering. "I know, I know, but apparently, he's not, so..." He shuffled from one foot to the next, swirling his drink in his free hand. "So, you know, I just thought you might want to know, about...that." He shrugged.

"Well, thanks, for telling me...that," Harry said, not entirely sure what he was supposed to say. "You're not on duty, are you?" If Ron was on duty, he was obligated by law, one of Hermione's laws, actually, to tell him.

Ron shuffled off from the wall. "Hermione told me that to avoid litigation, my answer to that question should always be yes." He shrugged. "Though I think it's more like a maybe."

Harry sighed. Ron on duty would mean loggerheads sooner or later. He thought for a split second about forfeiting the contract, but he'd already made the commitment, and these things were hard to back out of. On the other hand, though—

 _What did we say about hands?_ his voice of pragmatism reminded him. _You only have two, and they're busy._

The rose garden was decked out in twinkling fairies and yet more murderous streamers. One of them caught Harry by the arm when he brushed by it, and it was a struggle to extricate from it. If Lavender ever wanted a second career as a garrote man, Harry had some contacts to pass on to her.

Snape sat on a bench in the corner of the garden. He was fairly easy to spot, because he had somehow managed to create a thirty-foot clearance of people. Everyone else milled about on the other end, drinking and, if he heard correctly, mangling a filthy version of 'Weasley Is Our King.' He wondered if Hermione was out there; she'd been rather good with rhyming, and at their last drinking party ten years ago, she'd had four butterbeers on an empty stomach and sung a makeshift song about some of Ron's lesser known physical qualities.

Harry sat down next to him and leaned against the back of the bench. "So, I hear you've gone all night without hexing someone."

Snape glanced at him and frowned. "Think back to your school years with a tiny bit of clarity. When did I ever unnecessarily hex anyone?"

Harry watched three fairies give them a free show on the branch in front of them; someone had let them into the party for a butterbeer. Maybe it had been Hermione. "Good point, when you put it that way. You've been a very good sport about all of this," Harry said.

"I'm obligated to be here," Snape returned, playing his automatic response.

Harry could have said it along with him. "Severus, the reason I left was that I was sick of being Harry Potter, and working for the Ministry and being the poster child for the future." Pondering his sudden burst of candor with a bit of shock, he took in a big breath and watched the fairies remove the rest of their rather scant clothing, which seemed to be made of leaves. "It wasn't the best move on my part, and I wish I had done it differently, but, there it is."

Snape didn't say anything, and Harry resigned himself to another repudiation, possibly further rightfully deserved mockery.

Snape poked a rose bush with his toe. "I admit, I hadn't been expecting you to be here." His eyes flashed to Harry's for a second before refocusing on his foot. "And I will also admit that I might have been a little vindictive when I said that you were damaged."

It was a close to an apology acceptance as he was going to get, and to be truthful, he hadn't quite been expecting it at all. Sometime over the past twenty-four hours, the game plan in his mind had changed from getting Snape back to getting Snape to accept his apology. He wasn't able to pinpoint the exact moment in which his goal had changed. Perhaps it had been that first meeting, when something inside him had seen Snape for the first time in years and realised that he'd moved on without him, that he was perfectly capable of being alone, of getting on.

It suddenly seemed rather petty and selfish to think that Snape had been hung up on him, when in fact, it had turned out to be rather the opposite situation.

"I was going to ask you to dance," Harry said suddenly.

Snape snorted. "Don't."

Harry smiled and let his hand rest on top of Snape's on the bench. "Okay."

The fairies in front of them seemed to grow bored with their strip tease and instead began to make out. Harry wasn't sure if he was fascinated or a little repulsed. Snape glanced at his hand and then back at their impromptu entertainment. Inside they heard someone who sounded like a drunken Lavender announce that it was time for the men to show off their broomsticks.

"Do you think this was what she had in mind when she told us to polish the future?" Harry mused.

Snape simply stood. "There are things in the infirmary that require my attention." Harry shrugged. It was a rather odd sentence, but he stood as well. If Snape wasn't going to be out here, then he wasn't truthfully interested in the fairy show. Snape gave him a pointed look. "You look ill. Perhaps a trip to the infirmary for some Pepper-up?"

Harry grinned, stuffing his hands in his pockets and ignoring the knives. "Oh, yeah. I don't feel well at all."

***

"So, yesterday Albus told me that he wanted to see you before you left," Snape said as they walked down the hall away from Madam Pomfrey's sanctuary and towards the Great Hall. Harry suppressed the skip in his step as he finished buttoning his shirt and watched Snape pop his cuffs. Their path would take them right by his office, and Harry guessed that he was to be making another visit. Of course, he couldn't confess to the first visit, but he knew that he could count on Dumbledore's discretion.

"Oh, well, yeah," Harry said, knowing that he had to say something. He could always use the time up there to meander about and peek into Snape's private life. He shoved one hand in his pocket and fingered the knife strapped there. Snape hadn't said a single word about it, not even when he'd run his fingers over the hilt and slipped one finger up under the leather straps before—

"So, has he been badgering you incessantly?" he asked. "Giving sherbet lemons to the Fat Lady?"

Snape stopped in front of the stone gargoyle and gave Harry a withering look that he immediately knew was for the portrait upstairs. He might have been a good friend to Albus Dumbledore, but Harry knew that Snape's prickly personality wasn't just a cover, and he imagined that hours of Albus on end probably set him on edge. He wondered if he ever spent any more time than was absolutely necessary up in the Headmaster's office.

"Stinkweed," Snape said softly to the gargoyle, and Harry coughed. What, did he change it every day?

The stone gargoyle shifted and the staircase descended in a lazy spiral. "You want to come up with me?" Harry asked, one foot already on the stone steps.

Snape rolled his eyes. "A thousand times no. He'll just go on and on about how you and I were made to be together." He studied Harry critically and waved a hand. "I just can't take that yet." He jabbed a finger into Harry's shoulder. "I know precisely where everything is," he said. "There are countless books, objects and other items up there, and only I know which of them have been cursed."

Harry raised his hands in surrender. "I understand completely."

Snape seemed to consider something then, because he paused in front of him, not moving, but with no apparent agenda. Then just as suddenly, he reached out and grabbed the front of Harry's shirt, tugging it to him before his mouth covered Harry's and his other hand went to the back of his head in one knee-trembling, face-grabbing kiss.

When he was apparently finished kissing Harry, Snape drew back, looked elsewhere and backed up a step. "I'll wait for you downstairs."

He had to lean against the wall next to the staircase then, watching Snape's tall frame stride downstairs. He heard a dull thudding and was alarmed before he realised that it was his heart. The stone gargoyle tapped its foot then, eyes rolling; who said old dogs couldn't learn new tricks? Apparently everyone had something new today.

He had a lot of things to think about, and Dumbledore would be able to tell him if he thought Snape's new attitude was promising or something that was just temporary. Phineas would opt out of the conversation, but that was fine. Harry stopped for a second as he watched the staircase descend. Did he really just leave Snape in order to have a conversation with a portrait about Snape? Wasn't that rather two steps back?

Snape had disappeared down the hallway, presumably back to the open bar. Music continued to play, something slow and probably romantic. Harry wondered if he could get Snape drunk enough to sway with him in one of the completely darkened alcoves in which there were absolutely no people and no one would ever see them.

The solution seemed easy, bright, or in this case, completely dark and loaded with brandy and possibly a single malt scotch.

Harry tapped the forehead of the gargoyle and smiled. "I'm not going up," he told it. "You can close now."

The gargoyle sighed, but the steps behind him twisted up, receding into the ceiling. Harry cracked his knuckles and started off in the direction of the party, smiling to himself. This could all work.

The curse came from literally nowhere, perhaps the end of the deserted hallway. Harry jinked when he heard the casting out loud and was rather thankful that most people were incapable of casting nonverbal Unforgivables. The door to the classroom on his left was unlocked, and when he slammed his shoulder into the wood, it fell inward. He ducked around the corner of the room and skidded down the aisle, diving behind a desk and wondering just what the hell was going on.

He palmed one of the knives, his wand, and wished for a firearm. _This is that other hand we talked about earlier, fuckwit,_ his voice of pragmatism told him. _If I was another assassin and I was looking to--_

"Wait," Harry whispered to himself. Something was occurring to him. It was on the tip of his tongue, or mind, as the case was. He tilted his head and held his breath, listening for people in the room; it was completely silent, which meant that his attacker hadn't followed him in. It was easy to see why. There were no windows, and unless one was willing to lunge from desk to desk, there was essentially no cover. It would be easier just to wait for him to come out of the room.

"I always wanted to kill Harry Potter," said a voice in the hallway, and the sound of it shot into his memory like so much gunfire. Harry banged his head against the desk leg.

Bellatrix. _That_ was what had been in the back of his mind, nagging at him. Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange were the Frick and Frack of the Death Eater world, a fact that Harry had learned when he'd read their ancient files years ago in the ministry. She had to be angry that the Ministry had picked up Rodolphus in Hogsmeade. Another moment of realization stunned him when he was suddenly able to put a name to the half-face he had seen in Diagon Alley back in front of Gringotts.

They worked for fucking Confidential. And they did it together.

 _Merlin's fucking balls in a jar,_ Harry thought to himself, _what about_ lone killer _do people not understand?_

"You working alone today?" Harry sang out casually before relocating himself to a desk three aisles away, closer to the door. He wasn't going to waste time verifying that she was working for Confidential, not when he had a limited number of questions to ask that might be answered, and her status out there was much more critical. He shifted his hardware around so that he didn't have to reach into his trouser pocket for another knife.

Bellatrix didn't answer, but he heard her moving things about outside the room, probably blockading easy paths of escape. He'd have to run her gauntlet if he wanted to get out of this.

Harry closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and cast the first in a succession of _Reducto_ spells, which hit the wall and covered the immediate area with a shower of dust. He didn't need to see in order to move, though in retrospect he might have considered charming his glasses or eyes. Bellatrix coughed a few times, casting about rather inaccurately aimed curses, some of which Harry thought were imaginary. He ran a few extra feet and vaulted over a waist-high stone barrier that separated two hallways.

"I thought Molly killed you," he called over the barrier, then peeked over to see Bellatrix standing in the hallway, one hand on her hip, the other pointing her wand at Harry.

She cocked her head, and one corner of her mouth turned up. "After all this time, you still don't understand the concept of horcruxes?"

Harry dodged her _Avada Kedavra_. Horcruxes. It explained so much. I also explained a great deal of the crazy. Well, the new crazy, at least. Harry was actually at a bit of a loss on the old crazy. He decided then and there that if he got out of this, he was going on a quest to destroy every horcrux in the history of horcruxes. He would hire George and Fred to make a horcrux-detector, and he'd go over the whole of the British Isles with it like a hand-held metal detector if he had to.

Harry cast a Cruciatus for the first time in five years and laid it on when it hit Bellatrix in the chest. She fell to the ground and screamed, her back arching. Harry pressed his wand with a twist of his wrist but the curse cut off when he accidentally lowered the wand too much as he scrambled over the divider. Bellatrix rolled to her side, coughed up a mouthful of blood and raised her own wand.

" _Accio_ pillar," she said, her voice almost sweet.

Harry was caught in the back when most of the pillar hit him on the way to Bellatrix, but she had already rolled well aside, a clever move for a person who had just summoned several tons of masonry to where they had once been standing. Harry wondered what her tolerance was for the Cruciatis. It had to be phenomenal. He was more worried about the ceiling of the hallway, though. Weren't pillars architecturally essential or something?

"What the fuck?" he screamed as he hid behind a pile of stone and massaged his left leg. The remains of the pillar had severely hit it, and while he could put weight on it, he wondered if he'd damaged it beyond shrugging it off. In this case, however, nothing short of losing a limb was something that couldn't be shrugged off. "Are you trying to kill us both?"

Bellatrix charmed a large chunk of stone in his direction, and he watched it hit the far wall and shatter, chunks of it bouncing to his feet. "You like risks," she crooned. "You figure it out."

Harry leaned his back against the stones and sighed, his breathlessness and excitement warring with his voluntary decision not to breathe too deeply around a cloud of stone dust. This fight was, like the last spat he had with a Lestrange, a great deal longer than the fights he was used to having, but, unlike the last spat he'd had with a Lestrange, a great deal more successful in its attempt to terminate him. Once again, he wished for Ron.

Bellatrix tossed a large chunk of the broken masonry at him when she ran across the hallway, and followed it with another curse. She was quite good at covering her movements, almost too good. Harry started to wonder if she had been down in the potions lab with a vat of Felix Felicis.

 _Why did you even think that?_ his voice of pragmatism shouted. _This is the kind of thinking that gets you killed._

"Look, Bella," Harry said, knowing that using her short name would probably just make her angrier, Or madder. Or both. It couldn't hurt. "Let's just say that I was to retire—" He dodged another chunk of masonry and headed for the end of the hallway, hoping to find some suits of armor down there that he could fashion into an animated warrior. "Okay," he shouted from around the corner. "What if you, and I," he paused, not sure of what to say. The hallway was lined with suits of armor; he'd hit the jackpot.

"You're pathetic," Bella said loudly.

Harry rolled his eyes. Apparently time had made changes in all things, and these days Bellatrix Lestrange was all business, and she didn't talk during 'business.' _Maybe she bathed in Felix Felicis._ He leaned out in the hallway from the cover of the corner and waited for her next curse to broadcast her position.

Bellatrix's curse was cut short by a clanging sound, and then a series of cracks and sounds of bones crunching against either stone or metal. Harry froze in place and listened as something heavy fell to the ground, followed by another set of the same whacking sounds.

Harry prepared himself for cover fire and bent over to look around the corner at a lower level than the eye line. It was best to mix up where one looked out from cover.

Ron stood over Bellatrix, wand in one hand, a wrought iron fire poker in the other. He glanced up at Harry, chest heaving, and gave the body on the ground another round of throttles about the head and shoulders before staggering back and leaning against the wall.

Harry lowered his wand, and staggered around the short gate, favoring his left leg. It hurt incredibly, and he'd have to do something about it sooner or later.

"You, attract, trouble," Ron panted. He slid down the wall, and, still holding the poker and his wand, kicked at the body in front of him.

Harry lowered himself down next to Ron and considered the mess in front of them. "Yeah," he said breathlessly, "and never the good kind."

"Is there a good kind?" Ron replied, finally tossing the poker aside and reaching out with two fingers to snatch Bellatrix's wand. He snapped it in two with one hand, not seeming to be bothered by the sparks that shot from it and landed on his skin, but he did sigh and feel his face. "She cracked me in the nose with the back of her head before I got her." His fingers came away from his face with blood. "It doesn't feel broken, though."

Harry pocketed his wand and concentrated on massaging his cramped leg. Ron seemed to have recovered somewhat, because he inched himself into a standing position and Summoned the curtains from the classroom directly in front of them. They landed in a blood red heap in front of Harry, and he wanted nothing more than to pull them over himself and sleep off the impending adrenaline crash.

"Let's go," Ron said softly, cajoling him. He wasn't feeling sympathy, was he? "This is one thing I can't explain to the Ministry," he finished.

Harry was about to reply when Snape rounded the hallway corner and stopped dead in his tracks at the three of them in the hallway. His eyes flicked from Harry, bloody and dusty, to Ron, winded and still holding his wand, to Bellatrix's body, still leaking blood out on the stone floor.

"What the hell is going on here?" he hissed, his arms reaching for what Harry was sure would be a wand and a knife. Harry had seen them both earlier in the night, and the secret places they were hidden on Snape's person.

Ron sighed, but he straightened his back and palmed his wand in a grip that Harry recognised; things were about to get rather ugly. "Headmaster, I'm going to have to ask you to leave." He rolled his shoulders and tested his weight on his right leg, and Harry wondered if he'd somehow twisted it in the frenzy. Harry scrambled to his own feet and felt for his third knife, though on whom he would actually be using it was quite unclear.

Snape pursed his lips, took three steps forward and stopped short of Ron's ten-foot circle of attack. "What do you think you're doing, Weasley? Is that—"

"That," Ron said smoothly, "is Ministry business, and I really need you to leave a clear fifty-foot perimeter around the scene." He lifted one of the curtains and dropped it over Bellatrix's form. "This is an official investigation and as such, Auror Potter and I need to clear the area and set up an inquiry."

Snape's face drained of all colour before flushing red. "You have no authority to do this with—"

Ron turned towards Snape fully, so that Harry couldn't see his face. "This is Ministry jurisdiction right now, Headmaster. Please, leave the area." Harry wasn't sure what Ron would do when Snape pressed the matter later. Surely Ron couldn't conceal this from the Ministry so completely. Even more, why would he bother? Bellatrix would have been on their most wanted list anyway, especially since the formerly presumed dead Rodolphus had made an appearance earlier in the day.

But apparently Ron wanted to lay it on thick, and Harry wondered whether he was trying to cover something up for his sake. There could have been no doubt in Snape's mind when he had turned the corner and seen the both of them covered in blood, grime and dust that Harry was not just a passerby in the incident. "You can feel free to call Shacklebolt," Ron said, his voice as confident as Harry had ever heard it, perhaps even a little condescendingly, "but I assure you he is already monitoring the situation."

Snape's fingers curled and uncurled, and for a moment he looked as if he really was going to hit Ron, but in the end, he backed away from them, his eyes catching Harry's before they ripped away to glare at Ron one last time. "If I don't get a report in three hours, Mister Weasley, you and _Auror_ Potter are going to find that this institution has jurisdictions of its own." And with that, he turned the corner, never showing Harry his back.

Bellatrix's body was wrapped in the red curtains and Harry was just finishing mopping up the floor with the valance when Ron grunted and threw the body over his shoulder. "She smells like bladderwrack." Then he sniffed. "Oh, no wait, that's something else." To his credit, he didn't say anything else, but stalked down the hallway away from Harry, who scrambled to keep up.

"Where the hell are you going?" Harry rasped. His throat hurt, as if he'd been doing some heavy breathing in a dust bowl.

Ron gave him a withering look. "To take care of this, unless you want to take her to the party," he said, hitching up Bellatrix's body with one arm. Bellatrix wasn't a large woman, but Ron shouldered her with minimal effort, and for a second Harry realised just how much bigger Ron was from when Harry had his most crisp memories of him. The past ten years in the Ministry's employ had built him up, and when Harry reexamined him in his lens of combat, he finally saw that Ron was someone he should have been more concerned about in every way, really. Sure, Harry had known he was good with a wand, but now, Harry wondered if he and Ron would ever be able to just _throw down_ physically, just to see who would come out on top.

The idea was intriguing. He hadn't realised that he'd stopped for a second in the hallway, and now Ron was halfway down the rest of the hall before he turned around and glared. "Do you want to explain this to the next person who comes along? Let's go."

Harry shook his head and dashed off down the hallway, finally understanding where they were going when Ron opened the door to the girl's loo.

"Good," Ron said, dumping Bellatrix's body on the floor, "because I don't think I can remember how to say it." He gestured to the sink tap, with its inscribed snake carving hidden in the silver spigot.

Opening the Chamber of Secrets took little work, and on the count of three, they rolled the body down into the entrance. Harry tried not to listen to the succession of thuds and cracks as it fell down into the darkened pit, and wondered if anyone would ever open it again. First, there would have to be someone who spoke Parseltongue. Then there would have to be someone willing to divulge the location. The history books written since Harry and Ron's trip down there had been appropriately vague on the details, just as Harry and Hermione had planned.

Harry closed the entrance and the two of them lay on the floor then, all adrenaline fully dumped from their bloodstreams. Ron's face was sweaty and his robes had been sprayed with blood. Harry's outer robes were so torn that he removed them and thought to toss them in the Chamber with Bellatrix, but then thought better of leaving DNA evidence at a body disposal and instead incinerated them in the sink. Ron had watched from the floor, his arms splayed, one cheek resting against the stone.

"Don't think I didn't notice that you lied about your authority there," Harry breathed, freezing some water in the sink, wrapping it in some paper towels and handing it to Ron before making his own ice pack. "I honestly thought he was gonna call Kingsley."

Ron sighed. "Yeah. Lucky me."

Harry pressed the pack to his cut eye. "You did give him quite the Ministry speech," he added.

Ron grinned. "Probably the equivalent of five years of therapy right there, that was." He lowered the ice pack onto his nose and winced.

"Too bad Hermione missed it."

"I'll buy a Pensieve just to show her."

Harry frowned. "You're going to tell her? About...." He waved at the taps.

Ron raised the ice pack and sat up a little, leaning his weight on his elbows. "Merlin's balls, Harry. Think about how you just suggested that I keep a secret from Hermione Granger."

"Oh, yeah, okay." He wasn't sure that it was quite that okay, but he wasn't about to argue with Ron right now. Something about committing a felony brought men together. Even if it was in self-defense, and no one had thought she was alive. Wasn't that called double jeopardy? Or something?

Ron sighed. "Plus, the sofa, you know?"

Harry tossed the ice in the sink, rolled to his feet and reached down to give Ron a hand up. "We have _got_ to get you an air mattress."

***

No one had seen Snape since the beginning of the party. From the look on Hannah's face when he asked after the Headmaster, she had assumed that they had been rolling about in a private corner since they had arrived. Harry made a patrol of the party, staying to the edges, since he looked like he had just been soundly bludgeoned by Fred and George's spelled beater clubs.

It occurred to him that neither, Fred, George, or Angelina was in attendance. It was odd, since none of them seemed the type to miss a party, especially one in which they might terrorise Filch, whom Fred always laughingly called 'our old nemesis,' while rubbing his hands together.

Hermione and Cho were in deep conversation when he stopped to ask her about Snape, and he'd had to offer some excuse for his face, so he'd settled on saying that he and Ron had got into it with the Whomping Willow outside, something about a bet and possibly a Canary Creme. He hadn't been paying attention. When none of his leads came up with the answers, Harry wondered if Snape would have retreated into the Headmaster's office.

It didn't seem right. The Headmaster's office, while impregnable, was also home to many talking portraits, the subjects of which where incapable of keeping their thoughts to themselves. Snape, when on the run, or to fume, even if in only a sense, went to ground in darker, quieter environs.

Which was why Harry found himself in front of the Potions Lab, staring at Snape through the open door. His back was turned to him, but he had to have known Harry was there; the wards around the rooms had been activated and while they weren't forbidding access, they most assuredly announced the arrival of visitors. Snape had always warded both his classroom and his quarters together, and the feel of the defenses when Harry had stepped through them told him that Snape had never bothered to reset them once Harry had left. Maybe these were the same exact wards as they had been before he'd left.

"I thought you lived in Hogsmeade," Harry said softly.

"When it's not snowing," came the reply. Snape's form hadn't moved, but his shoulders were squared, and the unmistakable sound of a quill scratching on paper whispered under the conversation. Harry entered the room and meandered about the tables, which were crowded with jars from the storeroom. Snape organised the shelves whenever he was extremely upset, too upset to talk or curse anything.

"Look, I'm sorry you had to see—" Harry began.

"You can tell Ronald Weasley that he's improved in temperament since the last I saw him. He was _almost_ imposing." Snape set the quill down to the side and sat back on the stool before swivelling around to glare at Harry. "Did she attack you? Is that your mess up in the hallway, _Auror Potter_?"

Harry felt his face get hot. "Look Ron was just trying to—"

"I've had my fill of Auror Weasley and the entire Ministry for the past decade, thank you." Snape cut him off again, standing and running one hand along the desk to tap on the edge. His eyes glittered in the dim light, narrowed, furious. "Do you know how I had to fight to save my reputation after you left? Do you know how they looked at me after you disappeared, wondering," Snape gritted his teeth, " _wondering_ , if maybe they'd been wrong, if maybe I'd had something to do with your disappearance?" He glared at Harry. "And now here you are, running about as if no time has passed, not even stopping to think about what happened here, what might have happened to those you left behind."

"Merlin's balls! I've been running around here for the past two days, doing nothing but thinking of you!" Harry set a jar of frog brains down with enough force to crack the glass. Snape didn't seem to care. "If this is about Bellatrix, Ron and I took care of the body!"

Snape brushed back his hair and glared at Harry, but if he was shocked, it didn't show. "Oh really? And where is she now?"

Harry sighed and resigned himself to the fact that nothing was going the way he'd imagined it in his head. "In the Chamber of Secrets. But that's irrelevant."

"Murder is irrelevant." Snape echoed so that it was a question, crossing his arms.

" _I killed her for you_ ," Harry almost shouted, raising his hands above his head. Even as the words spilled out, he realised just how completely insane he sounded, as if the connection between his brain and his mouth had been completely severed.

"I don't recall ever asking for a dead Death Eater," Snape said calmly, picking up the jar Harry had damaged and repairing the spider web of cracks on its side. "But I imagine it's better than flowers."

"What do you think Bellatrix would have done if she'd managed to kill me, Snape? Go after you? Maybe the reunion?" Harry waved his hands about and gave up the ghost of trying to sound reasonable. "How did she even get into the castle without anyone noticing? These people are dangerous!"

Snape leveled his gaze away from the repaired jar and onto Harry. "You're lecturing me about danger," he stated. "Please, lecture me about killing people and dumping their bodies as well." He blinked once. "Tell me what you've been doing all these years, what Shacklebolt drove you to do."

Harry grabbed onto the back of a chair. "Kingsley didn't tell you—"

"Of course _he_ didn't." Snape set the jar down markedly less ferociously than Harry had before. "Phineas Nigellus Black is a notoriously horrid gossip." He crossed his arms. "So were you going to tell me?"

Harry shook his head, not in answer, but because it had never occurred to him that Phineas might tell _Snape_. Sure, he might have complained to another portrait, but Harry had always assumed that Phineas would be embarrassed enough by the sensitive nature of Harry's dreams about Snape that he would keep his mouth shut about their talks.

"Tell, me Harry," Snape said softly, "when were you going to tell me about the dead people?"

"It wasn't the Ministry," he said, waving a hand. "It was in the beginning, and then when I left, it wasn't. It doesn't matter anyway, because it's not as if the work changed. I do the same thing now that I would have done for him..." he trailed off when Snape crossed his arms.

"So you just ended up doing the very thing you were doing for the Hit-Aurors," Snape clarified. "And that seemed ethically acceptable to you?"

Harry backed up against the wall, feeling a bit of satisfaction when his shoulders hit the stone. "It doesn't matter whether I do it or someone else does it," he intoned, "someone is going to kill these people."

Snape snorted and rifled through a stack of papers on the desk. A stray thought in Harry's mind wondered if this was even Snape's lab anymore. "So, you get to decide who lives and dies."

"For god's sake, Severus, the Ministry does it—"

"You're not the Ministry!" Snape shouted, one of his hands crunching the papers in a vice grip. "And even if you were, this isn't the war." He dropped the paper on the table and stalked to the door, away from Harry. "No one made you a murderer, you know," he said over his shoulder as he opened the door to the inner chamber. "You made yourself one."

Harry watched the door slam, and the man in the portrait above the desk gave him the evil eye. "Will you stop mucking things up?" the man grumped before pulling pair of earmuffs from nowhere and jamming them on his head.

He left the way he came, closing the door quietly. He stood in the hallway, staring at the wall sconces lining the way up from the dungeons. "Stop mucking things up," he repeated to himself.

***

 **ACT IV:**

 _Gonna call out to these embers waiting to ignite  
Gonna pull you up  
By your love, by your love_  
(Cyndi Lauper, "Shine")

When Harry woke up the next morning, he nicked breakfast from the kitchens and then set out down the path to Hogsmeade, his headset already on. Most of the people on the path were chatting merrily or good-naturedly nursing hangovers while making their way along the winding trail that led to the gates. Harry took Snape's straight line through the grass from the night before.

He'd visited the dungeons earlier in the morning, but they proved to be rather deserted. Snape had either waited until Harry had gone to escape, or had left impossibly early in the morning. It was a moot point anyway. There was no way Harry could do anything about Snape or the fact that he had ruined things before there even _was_ anything to ruin. Their conversation in the dungeons had laid bare everything that Harry could verbally admit, and all that Snape openly felt, and well, that had been that.

He all but ran to the gates and used his last step out of the fencing to turn in midair and Apparate to the far end of the village. He could have walked, but the route took him past Snape's house, and he didn't want to have to deal with it. Or see it. Or pretend that there was even anything there he needed to deal with. Instead, he was milling about the ruins of the Shrieking Shack/Phoenix Feather, looking for his .22 when he was finally able to establish a connection with Angelina.

"What are you doing?" he asked as soon as she picked up.

"Hallooooooo there, loverboy," Angelina said in a low voice. Harry wondered just what she meant by that, but the truth was that she had probably just been shagged 'daily and nightly and ever so rightly,' as she liked to say. He had learned not to ask about her sex life, because the last time he had questioned some of her terminology she had made him flash cards with stick figures. And they had been anatomically correct.

Harry shook his head but let her answer in her own time. There was a hollow clanging sound and a large crash. "I just cooked the CPU with a Jelly-Legs Jinx. It was fantastic." She coughed. "But everything smells a bit electrical now." Angelina took breaking down the office very seriously.

"Good." Harry tried to Summon the .22 with more generic terms, such as 'gun,' 'firearm,' and 'boomstick.' None of them worked and he heard Angelina let out what suspiciously sounded like a guffaw. He scuffed his shoe on a big rock and glanced about the trees. "I'll do this stuff here and then I'll find you."

Angelina sighed. "Like that'll be hard. I'm dating your best mate's brothers."

Harry stopped, trying to process the possibility of a plural on the last word of Angelina's sentence. In any case, it wasn't his business. "Oh, yeah. Before you torch the place, look under my desk."

He heard Angelina break the window to his office door, probably with her gloved fist and probably just for fun, as she explored the other room; she did like the destruction. There was a sound of industrial Spellotape being ripped from the underside of the desk, and he knew that she'd found the packs of Muggle notes and rolls of Galleons that he'd left for her.

"Oh, Harry," she breathed, "this is lovely."

Harry smiled. "You earned it. Though I should penalise you for not being here last night."

Angelina paused. "We thought it would be too weird." He heard her bang on something. "Oh wait, I think I wasn't supposed to break _that_. Oooh, sir, can I keep the ficus?"

***

Harry was finishing up repacking his robes when Ron and Hermione joined him in the boys' dormitory. Hermione flopped herself down on Ron's old bed. "Good Lord, I should have let you levitate me up the stairs."

Ron smirked. "You said it was undignified," he told her, "after last time with Rose."

Hermione fingered the curtains and rubbed her stomach with one hand. "Well, true, but I think age has mellowed my ego somewhat."

Harry grinned. "Age: one, Hermione: seventy billion."

Hermione smiled. "When you put it like that, it sounds so much better. Oh, and speaking of age," she added, reaching into her robes and pulling out a folded newspaper. "Ron was surprised to learn that you are my secret lover." Harry took the paper from her and examined the splash page of him and Hermione arm in arm as he helped her recover from a near fall, slightly smiling, looking rather smug. The title, above the fold, read, _Harry Potter and Forbidden Love?_

Ron set his chin on Harry's shoulder. "Naturally, I was shocked."

"Shocked," Hermione echoed, shaking her head as she grinned.

Harry read the first few lines before deciding that he didn't quite care and instead turned the paper so that he could see the sidebar column, which featured a smaller picture of him and Ron from the night before, after they'd been bloodied up by Bellatrix. The much smaller caption read, _Trouble at the Hogwarts Reunion as Potter and Weasley engage in fisticuffs over Weasley's current wife, Hermione Granger._

"Wow," he said, watching his photo self tenderly finger his bloody eye and glare at something Ron said. It had probably been that one moment in which Ron had suggested Harry let Terry Boot nurse his wounds. "So Ron, Hermione's only your _current_ wife."

Ron rounded his shoulder and sat down on the bed next to Hermione, grinning. "Yeah, I plan on racking up at least three."

Harry tossed the paper in his suitcase, thinking to show it to Angelina, when the loverboy comment from earlier suddenly became clearer. "I thought Skeeter had a moratorium on writing nasty things about us," he said sulkily. He could _hear_ the sulk in his voice even as he said it.

Hermione rolled her eyes. "No, not anymore. Five years ago, when her Animagus form was discovered by a rival member of the press, I lost my leverage on her." She poked at the curtains and sneezed. "Of course, I did manage to broker her fine in lieu of gaol."

Ron grinned and ran one hand down her stomach. "It was some crazy random number, right?"

"One hundred fifty-seven thousand, six hundred three Galleons, twelve Sickles, and four Knuts." When Harry raised an eyebrow, she smiled at him. "The exact amount of royalties earned for her ghastly Dumbledore biography ten years ago. It only seemed fair."

Harry laughed outright then, throwing his head back and closing his eyes for a second, and it felt fantastic, even though his stomach muscles ached. Ron buried his face in Hermione's hair and mumbled, "I love your brain."

"On that note, it's time to collect Rose from my parents'," Hermione said. She held out her arms to Ron, who took them and pulled her to her feet with ease. "I'm sure they've had plenty of time to clean her teeth and x-ray every phantom cavity." She bit her lip and smiled at Harry. "I _do_ have those Herbertson-Cleever papers to go over." Behind her, Ron rolled his eyes and stuck his finger down his throat. "I saw that."

Ron stuffed his hands in his pockets and watched Harry close the clasp on his suitcase. "So, Harry, you leaving soon?"

Harry's fingers itched to retrieve the other suitcase from under the bed. All of the others had left already, the house-elves whisking their suitcases down to the gates. Harry was going to open his dossier, prep, and then take care of business. Then he was going to go home and stare at the ceiling for a few hours, much like he did on the other nights he wasn't working. Part of him wanted to see Snape one more time, perhaps skulk about the gardens and wait for him, but he'd made it clear the night before that he wasn't ever going to be interested.

Just as well. Harry had better things to be doing.

"Yeah," he said finally, reaching out for Hermione's embrace and hugging her as tightly as possible.

Over her shoulder, his eyes met Ron's, and he wondered if they might ever discuss what they had done the night before. In the two years they had worked for the Ministry, they had gone on more than a few missions and done worse things, but every time Harry had thought to discuss it with Ron, he had found that he didn't have the words, but now Ron's face had been one of careful placidity. It was comforting, in its own way, and looking at Ron, Harry understood that this would be no different.

Ron held out his fist and Harry touched his own knuckles to Ron's. It was very gangster, less stiff, the only physical marker of how Ron felt about the last night. Like Harry, he saved his handshakes for strangers.

They left him in the room, and after fifteen minutes of staring out the dormitory window, Harry saw them moving down the trail to the Hogwarts gates. He turned away from the window, slapped the post-it note on top of the suitcase and watched it vanish; it would be waiting for him when he got back home. That just left the other one, hulking under the bed like a boggart in the room. Harry opened it, pulled out the dossier and tossed it on the duvet with two fingers before cracking his knuckles in anticipation.

The dossier gleamed on the duvet, and with one hand Harry reached out and peeled back the Spellotape seal. He tried not to look as he tipped the envelope and slid the thin portfolio out onto the bedspread. For a second his eyes didn't register the image he was seeing, and then, "Fuck."

***

Snape was in his garden, pulling up some atrocious looking flowers and tossing them into a pile, when Harry arrived, his broom going so fast that the cheap brake in the Cleansweep didn't respond at first. Harry used the momentum of the broom to swing it in an arc and pass Snape overhead. His eyes scanned the trees that bordered the back of the house and sure enough, he was rewarded with a small flash of movement. Someone was out there.

"Severus!" he called, partially expecting to the hexed by the man, but instead Snape looked up at him and set down his spade.

"Potter, I thought I made it clear that—"

"There's a contract out on your life," Harry said, circling the broom one last time while he tossed the portfolio to Snape, the papers falling everywhere. The broom was low enough to the ground that he hopped off and let it drop. "We have to get inside now," he said, grabbing the crook of Snape's elbow and tugging, even though he now had no free hands to cast a spell or fire a gun. He shoved Snape in the front door and slammed it closed.

"Potter, what—"

Harry laid the case on the hallway table and opened it, pulling out a .38 and a series of knives. "Look, I don't have a lot of time here, so I'll make it simple." He snapped a magazine into the grip of the gun. "It was about eight years ago, and you and I were together, and I was sitting there on the eve of the Hogwarts Battle anniversary, thinking." He glanced up at Snape. "I'd just killed Nott in a hovel in Belarus, and all I could think of was the way he'd begged for his life and then shit his pants." He pulled the slide back and loaded the chamber.

The back door slammed open and Harry emptied twenty rounds into the kitchen. He hit something, because there was a cry and a large noise of someone crashing into Snape's hutch, spilling dishes everywhere. A teacup rolled across the floor into the doorway.

Harry waited for the second wave of intruders, gun pointed at the kitchen, wand pointed at the front door. "So I realised that the only reason I did it was because it seemed like the extension of a mission that was long over. Well, that, and I was out to kill everyone involved in the Death Eaters." He fired off a few rounds, just for good measure, then holstered his wand to duck into the kitchen and kick the body on the ground, punching the heel of his boot into the man's windpipe. Snape's head peeked into the kitchen and watched him with widened eyes.

Harry ejected the magazine, letting it drop to the floor, and shoved another one into the grip, still pointing it at the back door. He flipped his wand back into an offensive position with his free hand and backed out into the hallway again. "So I figured that since I loved you so much, I should probably leave."

He waved Snape up the stairs with his wand hand. Snape complied, but only after he'd grabbed the weapons case. "So there I was, three months ago in the back room of some filthy bar in Toronto, getting one of the _worst_ blowjobs in the history of oral sex, when I thought about the last time I'd had a _good_ blowjob." Harry backed up the steps, still monitoring the front door. There was a shadow on the curtains, and he emptied another magazine into the front door. The glass shattered and someone fell outside.

"So then I started thinking that maybe what I had decided to do had been wrong. Maybe what I was doing was unhealthy; is this revenge? Is revenge justified, all those kinds of things, you know?" The front door burst open and a volley of _Reducto_ s pulverised the foyer table. Harry was sure that one more would come through the back door, since they always worked in pairs in Confidential's brave new world.

Snape opened his mouth and Harry cut him off, gesturing for silence. He peeked over the banister railing and just missed a curse aimed for his head. He fell to the floor and, pulling Snape with him, lay there, throwing his arm over the edge of the railing and firing haphazardly in the general direction of his attacker. This magazine was going quickly, as well.

"Maybe there is a governmental system that works, right?" he whispered, his face close to Snape's as they lay on the floor. Snape blinked a few times, and his eyebrow raised, a familiar expression. Harry gave him about a minute to adjust to the violence before he was cursing someone's hands off. "Maybe there's some sort of reason that we're here on earth aside from all the regular day to day shite. Maybe there's something more than exacting some sort of archaic justice."

"All this brought on by a bad blowjob?" Snape whispered. Harry's assessment of a minute had been way too long.

Harry listened for noise in the kitchen; there was enough broken pottery and china to ensure that stealth wouldn't be a factor back there. "It was a very bad blowjob," he answered distractedly. They crawled on their hands and knees further back into the upper hallway, rising finally at the end and opening the last door, which was a broom closet. "I'm not saying it wouldn't take some getting used to, you know, and that I wouldn't have to earn back your trust, but I think that maybe we could make it work, you know?"

Snape shoved the case back at Harry and pulled his wand from his robes. "Why are all these people here? Because of me?"

Harry ignored him, instead fishing the rest of the magazines out onto a hallway table and considering the rifle in the bottom of the case. He'd have to put it together, and that would waste about thirty seconds. Maybe as a last resort.

"Yes. So think about it: we could—" There was a crash downstairs and Harry wondered where Snape's potions lab was. Once Harry had done a hit in a meth lab by mistake and it had taken him days to regrow his eyebrows.

"Mister Potter," Confidential's gravelly voice called from the bowels of the downstairs. "Why are we always at odds?"

Harry turned to Snape again. "If you could imagine that we might start—"

"I have an unlimited supply of wands and several Muggle flashbangs at my disposal," Confidential said loudly.

Harry shoved Snape into the closet and made sure he had his wand. "Stay here." Snape glared at him but didn't say anything when he closed the door. Harry threw the weapons case to the end of the hallway and dumped the rest of his magazines in his pockets. The stairs creaked and he threw himself into the open bedroom door, covering his movement while someone cast a Cruciatus up the stairs. There was another creak and Harry was able to pinpoint the location enough to fire out of the bedroom and hit something, because he or she fell down the stairs with a succession of thuds. With any luck that was the second partner and Confidential was running out of warm bodies to throw at him.

There was no escaping the creaking of the stairs, and Harry's self-levitation skills left a great deal to be desired, especially the levitation part. A check of the hallway through the banister rails revealed that the hallway downstairs was clear. Harry took the steps two at a time, hoping that the idiosyncrasy of the sound would confuse Confidential as to his location in the stairwell, but on the last double step his legs caught up with him and he stumbled into the wall at the bottom of the steps.

The Imperious caught the tip of his hand, and he felt it slide up his arm and try to take over the rest of his chest. That was unexpected. Harry tried to shake it out of his hand, and while it was weak, the internal struggle with the curse left his body immobile and unguarded in the hallway.

Which was apparently the plan, because he narrowly missed the knife headed in his direction when he was finally able to shrug off the spell and fall backwards onto the steps.

"Mister Potter," Confidential said from either the dining room or the sitting room; they were connected and on the other side of the floor plan. "We should be working together, not shooting at each other."

Harry turned to face Confidential as he emerged from the cover of one of Snape's armchairs and held up two wands; he was double fisting it today. Just fucking great. Harry wracked his brain for a good response, but settled for casting a good old _Confringio_ , one of his personal favorites, and winced when it hit Snape's armchair, blasting bits of stuffing, wood and upholstery everywhere. _Yeah,_ his voice of pragmatism said, _didn't think that one through._ He used the distraction of the debris to cross the hallway and listen to Confidential run into the dining room.

"Come now," Confidential called. Harry slid the magazine into the .38 and slammed it in with the flat of his palm. "Let's just go upstairs together and end this. It could be the inaugural termination to our partnership."

Harry flattened his back to the wall and peeked around the corner to the sitting room. An _Avada Kedavra_ sailed through the doorway from the dining area and hit a bookcase, burning a hole into the wood. "Isn't 'inaugural termination' a bit of an oxymoron?" he asked finally, getting ready to move. Every time he talked, he would have to change locations.

So he dove into the kitchen, covering himself until the gun dry fired. Confidential might have only worked in the Wizarding world, but he was no stranger to firearms, and he was staying out of the way. Harry made his way to the other side of the room and hid behind the counter that divided the two rooms.

"Why can't you see that working together in an organised fashion is the most conducive way to operate?" Confidential said loudly from the other side of the counter. Harry slapped his pockets in vain. He had no more magazines left. He'd just have to do it the old fashioned way. He hated the old fashioned way; it was so... _old_.

"I don't know," Harry said, bartering for time. "I don't do well with groups. Will this be like a dictatorship or a democracy?"

"A republic," Confidential answered. "Possibly the parliamentary system."

Harry grounded himself and cast a few mild spells over the counter. "Pass," he said.

"Does that _Expelliarmus_ you just cast mean that your Muggle guns are out of ammunition?"

Harry had learned that lying was ineffective, and that not saying anything was as much as admitting the truth. "Yeah. I thought I'd brush up on the classics." To prove this, he cast a _Rictusempra_ , not quite aiming it but deciding that if it hit Confidential, then he'd be the luckiest person on earth.

"How did you ever manage to pass Charms?" Confidential said lightly, but he hadn't done anything in the past few seconds, and Harry was worried that he was readying something, like those flashbangs that he'd mentioned. Harry wished for a moment that he'd thought of flashbangs and wondered if Snape was still in the closet upstairs. He would have been very useful if Harry had thought of more than protecting him, a skill that he hadn't had occasion to hone for the past three years.

 _Your protection planning consisted of shoving him in a closet with no windows,_ that other unfamiliar voice told him. _I'd say you're not made for the bodyguard gig._

He tossed the gun on the floor and remembered that he'd never got around to conjuring bullets out of lead, something that had always been on his list of things to do.

The flashbang landed on his side of the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room, and Harry spent the first two seconds of the five-second fuse blinking. The last three were dedicated to screwing his eyes as shut as possible, turning his head away, and casting the fastest _Silencio_ his tongue would allow.

And it worked. Harry heard the click of the mechanism, but no concussive boom. His vision went white just for a second, even through his eyelids and averted head.

"Well done, Mister Potter," Confidential said, and then cast a _Sectumsempra_ over the top of the counter. Harry blinked and wondered what he was going to do next. Stall, probably.

"I aim to please," he yelled. _What else in this room can be a weapon?_

"Then stand up, and we'll shake hands and--- not a good move!" Confidential yelled when Harry pushed the contents of the counter that he could reach over the edge and onto the other side. Several of them were large canisters. He was rewarded when one of the canister lids returned to his side, bouncing angrily on the tiled floor.

He glanced at the back door, blasted open and smoking, and wondered if he could cover the distance. Probably not. It was worth a try, since his and Snape's chances of survival increased exponentially if he made a hasty exit to the forest outside. He pulled one of the kitchen chairs to him by the leg and picked it up, crouching in preparation to slam the chair onto the counter and surprise the fuck out of Confidential long enough to dash for the door.

The chair hit Confidential's shield charm and bounced off, but Harry didn't stay to look. He was halfway to the door when he felt a tingling sensation that meant that someone was behind him, and heard a strange sound like, "Hem hem." Like the night before, his memory jarred so quickly as he whirled around that the snapping of it might have given his body more momentum. Confidential had popped up over the barrier and swung his wand arm up. Harry cocked his head and raised his wand, thinking to cast an _Expelliarmus_ , since it had always been his lucky spell.

" _Accio_ Walther P22," he said under his breath instead, knowing that there was no way the gun would get to him in time, even if the spell worked. He started a drop to the floor, but he could already hear the _Avada Kedavra_ coming from Confidential's mouth. He closed his eyes in reaction, something he hadn't done in combat in ages. It just felt right.

There was a series of gunshots and Harry fell to the floor, expecting to be hit with Confidential's curse on the way down. His feet skidded and his legs spread, splitting as he landed soundly on the tile.

Nothing happened. Harry rolled to his feet and brought his wand up, opening his eyes just in time to see Confidential drop both wands and fall to the floor, smoke coming from what appeared to be several holes in his chest. As he fell, Snape's figure came into view like an eclipse; Snape grimaced as he lowered the gun to pan along the body in front of him, his eyes only lifting to look for Harry once he was sure that Confidential wasn't getting up again.

Harry's lost .22 sailed through one of the broken windows, slammed into Harry's chest and clattered to the floor. He stared at it dully. _I hate that gun._

The glamour around Confidential faded from the feet up, and Harry wiped his brow with the back of his hand, watching as the last of the gray dissolved and he was left with a figure in a pink track suit with racing stripes down the legs. He followed the line of the body up to the head and stared dumbly into the dead eyes of Dolores Umbridge. A small locket around her neck glittered with the movements of a gilded kitten.

"That was...what?" he said aloud. Across the room, Snape put the gun up and flipped the safety on with his thumb. Harry glanced up at him and then back to Umbridge's body. The kitten on her locket mewled.

Snape's face was calm as he pocketed the firearm and sat down in the only upright chair in the dining room. "I think, Harry, that you should drop your wand."

Harry had just enough time to let his wand clatter to the floor and raise his hands above his head when three Aurors burst through the door.

***

Ron sighed at the destruction in the room. "No offense, Headmaster, but I'm quite glad this weekend is over."

Snape's voice carried from the kitchen. "Completely mutual, Auror Weasley."

Harry had been relieved of his weaponry. Twenty minutes prior, Aurors had burst in and then lowered their wands; then Snape had shouted a few uncharming epithets about them, and there had been more sharp words on either side until Ron had shown up and made Harry and Snape sit down on the sofa and give a report of everything that had happened.

Once Snape had given his cursory and forgivingly short summary of the past ten minutes, he had gone to the wrecked kitchen and put on a kettle. Ron had set his team about recovering the bodies and photographing the scene before mending some of the larger holes in the walls. Harry sat on the sofa and watched them, his hand itching to be on his wand, but still aware that Ron had both his and Severus's in his pocket, a standard measure in the first half-hour of investigating a scene.

"Was that a flashbang in the kitchen?" Ron asked, raising his eyebrows.

Harry ran his hands through his hair and pressed his palms in his eye sockets. "Yeah."

"Huh," Ron replied. He leaned against the wall next to the fireplace and crossed his arms.

"Your team played this a great deal closer than I had anticipated, Auror Weasley," Snape said when he returned to the sitting room. He set the service tray down on a recently repaired table and watched as two cleaners mended the rest of the dishes.

Ron sighed. "We didn't have confirmation until after it had already started. They took out Dawlish on the south perimeter and came from the woods."

Snape snorted. "Is it quite safe to have Dawlish on duty anymore? The man's brain must have the consistency of Yorkshire pudding by now." He handed Harry a cup of tea, and another to a passing Auror who was mending his beloved armchair. Harry felt a twinge of guilt.

"I'm not in the loop here," he finally confessed. "Did you see who that was in there?" Harry gestured wildly to the kitchen. His tea spilled all over the floor, and a passing Auror siphoned it up without pausing. "What are you all doing here?" For once, Harry suspected that he was as stunned as he was supposed to be pretending to be.

Ron smiled and shoved off from the wall. "Remember when I said that I was maybe on duty?" Harry nodded and he continued, "When we got wind that Confidential had taken the contract on Headmaster Snape, naturally we contacted him and warned him." Ron accepted the cup of tea from Snape with a nod.

"And I, never one to pass up the help of the Ministry, told them to shove their support team up their collective arses." Snape refilled Harry's half-empty teacup, his mouth half-smiling.

Stirring his tea, Ron yelled something out to one of the Aurors in the kitchen about bagging Umbridge's hands. "Yes, well, in light of such a warm reception, we decided to put a team on the house. I believe you saw one of them taking pictures of you the other day."

Harry thought back to the old lady in the house across the lane. "You're very sneaky," he said.

Ron rolled his eyes. "The Headmaster's years of espionage made it hard to put him under surveillance, much like other people in whom the Ministry still has interest. I'm sure that Snape was aware of our presence despite my tricksy ways." He sipped from his cup and watched the cleaner repair the bookshelf. Snape batted the cleaner's hands away from the books and fix the spines himself, muttering about incompetence.

"After last night and this afternoon," Snape said, turning back to them and crossing his arms, "I think I might have been remiss in dismissing your offer so brashly. Have you seen the back door?"

Ron smirked, though at what was unclear. "They're fixing that as we speak. The least we could do for the Dawlish thing."

Snape sighed. "All right then," he mumbled grudgingly. He accepted Ron's handshake.

"This is surreal," Harry said finally, watching as the two of them shook hands cordially, or as cordially as Snape and a Weasley could, which was by most standards rather frosty. "Dolores Umbridge tried to kill me. And Snape," he added. He had almost called her Confidential but stopped when he realised that he wasn't supposed to be privy to that information per his official statement of earlier.

Ron shrugged. "I've had someone on Confidential for months, but I just never seemed to nail him. Or her, as the case proved to be." Ron finished his tea and set the saucer down gently on the tray. "To be honest I'm rather relieved that it worked out the way it did, as I had been rather convinced that it was you," he said in sotto voce.

Harry wiped his brow. No matter how many times he rubbed with his hand, it still felt like something was there. "I think I might be in shock," he said to no one.

Ron reached out to tip his chin up and look at his pupils. "Did you hit your head?" he asked, and Harry could imagine for a moment that Ron wasn't his best friend, but simply a top Auror in the Ministry. He was gentle, unattached, and commanding. It was rather off-putting. Harry wanted his friend back, and was rewarded when, for a split second, Ron's eyes flashed with worry.

"No," he answered. "It's just...that was Umbridge, Ron. I had _no_ idea that—" he broke off when something in Ron's face told him to keep quiet for the other Aurors. He didn't want to have Ron lie for him any more than he already was going to.

Ron let go of his face, and Harry set his teacup aside, standing as close to Ron as he could without arousing suspicion. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked Ron's shoulder. They were breaking Kingsley's huddling rule, and Harry hoped that Ron's team was trustworthy, or at least that none of them had access to Extendable Ears.

"It was all need-to-know, actually," Ron said, handing Harry and Snape their respective wands and nodding his head to the cleaner in the sitting room. "We're done here."

The cleaner snapped up the clasps to his valise and nodded at Ron. Harry glanced about to see that a great deal of the damage had been repaired. The blood was gone, and the holes in the walls were gone. There was a great deal of untidiness in general, but nothing that couldn't be mended with a few simple cleaning spells and a bit of rearranging. Harry followed Ron to the door.

"That said," he told them as he walked to the door. "I'm rather glad it wasn't you, Harry," he said, his eyes levelling with Harry's as he stood in the doorway.

"Wait, were you gonna kill me if I...?" Harry trailed off as Ron raised his eyebrows and closed the door behind him. Outside in the yard, he yelled something to the rest of the crew, and the faint crack of their Disapparation filtered back. Harry stared at the wood of the door, faintly catching Snape's reflection in the glass. "Well, that's unsettling."

Snape said nothing, but busied himself setting all of the discarded teacups on the service tray before glancing out the window. When he was satisfied with what he saw, he removed the gun from the inner pocket of one of his robes and examined it.

"Of all of the shocking things today," Harry said finally, "that was the biggest." He nodded at the gun.

"Not Dolores Umbridge plotting all our demises?" Snape asked, running his hand along the slide.

Harry shrugged. "Once I got used to the pink tracksuit, it actually makes a bit of sense. I mean, she disappeared after the war. Hermione was furious that she couldn't help to prosecute her." He rejoined Snape in the sitting room, still smelling faintly of ozone and pine, the only evidence remaining of violence and healing that had occurred in the room in the past hour.

"I just never figured that you'd be so...Muggle," he said finally, knowing how completely ridiculous he sounded. He had been saying moronic things all weekend; Snape did that to him.

Snape didn't look at him. He brushed a strand of hair that had come loose away from his face. "Really, Harry, I've been hated by more than one faction of the Wizarding world for over twenty years. Do you think I'd be completely unprepared?" Snape released the magazine and pulled it out, looking at the remaining bullets inside.

Harry felt his mouth opening and closing, but no sound came out. Finally, he managed something, though in retrospect he might have decided not to. "But a _firearm_?"

Snape set the magazine on the table and pulled back the slide, dumping the round from the chamber before releasing it and clicking on the safety. He waggled the butt at Harry. "The best counter for the expected is the unexpected. Wouldn't you agree?"

Harry slumped against the wall a little. "No," he grumbled out petulantly.

"Really, Harry, that doesn't work anymore. You're considerably older, and sulking because your lover has done something unexpected is hardly attractive."

Harry didn't say anything. Snape offered him another cup of tea and sat down next to him on the sofa. Harry glanced over at the gun lying on the table in front of them. "Is...is that a Glock 18?"

Snape cocked his head, reloaded the bullet into the magazine, and slammed it back into the grip. "Do you care?"

"Can I...can I..." Harry drifted off when he realised that he was about to ask to touch another man's Glock. It just wasn't done. Then again, Severus wasn't a professional killer. "Can I touch it?"

Snape handed him the grip and he took it, wondering just where Snape had got hold of not just a firearm in Wizarding Britain, but one that was produced for and used solely by an elite Austrian commando unit. "Where did you get it?" Harry smoothed his hand over the slide and admired the stenciled silver serpent inlaid on the grip.

Snape sipped his tea. "Miss Johnson was kind enough to sell it to me three years ago." He quirked his lips. "You should see about that bit of freelance arms dealing she's been doing on the side."

Harry ejected the magazine and examined it. "It's automatic."

"Twelve hundred rounds a minute," Snape replied, almost stopping short when Harry glanced at him.

Harry stared at him dully. "I love you."

Snape took the gun from him. "You can't have it," he said, setting it down on the service tray next to the dirty cups. Before Harry could protest, he added, "But thank you anyway."

Harry sat back on the sofa, stretching his legs out in front of him and closing his eyes. If Snape was going to hex or kill him at this moment, which he was pretty sure he _wasn't_ going to do, but if he _was_ , then Harry decided that he was going to let him. The excitement of the Aurors' arrival had kept his blood pumping adrenaline through his system, but now he was in danger of crashing.

He heard the service tray thudding on the kitchen counter, and some sort of clinking as Snape probably set the cups in the sink. He wondered where Snape was stashing the gun, but it was the halfhearted kind of wondering that was content to never be answered. Harry let his wand settle into the crease between his leg and the cushions, hoping that at least Snape would let him sleep on the sofa. Ron and Hermione's was probably going to be occupied.

A pair of hands settled on his chest and he had just enough time to open his eyes before Snape's mouth descended on his, his lips forcing Harry's open, his breath like tea and sugar. His hair fell about Harry's face and it smelled like anise, lemon and hyssop. The fabric of Snape's shirt brushed against Harry's hands when he reached up to grasp the arms, and further exploration revealed that Snape had divested himself of all of his outer robes, a most promising gesture.

Harry ran his hands along the seams of Snape's shirt, from the top of the shoulder to under the arms, then down the sides and to the waist so that he could grasp the hem and tug, pulling it free and up over Snape's head with one swift motion. The shirt tore at the cuffs before he pulled it away fully, tossing it in the corner somewhere; it wasn't lonely for long—in seconds, it had company in the form of Harry's shirt, trousers and socks.

Snape's hands meandered down Harry's sides and stopped at the long handled knives strapped to Harry's thighs, his fingers pressing up under the buckles that held them to his legs. Harry froze for a moment, his own hands stilling. If he let Snape take these off, he'd have nothing on him at all, not one weapon, not even his wand.

"Oh, go ahead," he said, closing his eyes when Snape's fingers undid the first buckle and loosened the upper strap, and then the lower, peeling the sweaty leather from his leg, his head bending to kiss the newly exposed flesh and run his tongue along the pink of it. The knife fell to the floor with a thunk. When Snape reached for the other leg, he merely pulled the knife from its sheath and set it aside on the table. His other hand tugged at the leather, but didn't undo the buckles.

Harry blinked at Snape, who rose back up to rest his forehead against Harry's. "We'll leave that one right where it is for now," he whispered, his lips capturing Harry's once more.

Harry thought about it for a second after they broke apart, his breath quick and his body filling up again with adrenaline, though for a completely different reason. "Whatever you say." He tried to open the front of Snape's trousers, but his fingers didn't want to work the buttons. "What the hell? Have you still not heard of zippers, man?"

Snape slid one finger inside the elastic of Harry's y-fronts and smiled a little. "Mind your tongue, Mister Potter. I haven't forgiven you for almost completely destroying our house, in addition to accepting a contract to kill me," he murmured.

Harry gave up trying to undo Snape's flies and stuck his hand in the waistband. It would have been counterproductive to mention that he'd taken the contract without knowing the target. Such kind of talk wasn't particularly arousing. And he hadn't missed the reference to it being their house, but that was also not something he was willing to mention at the time. "I can offer you cash, credit or promissory notes," he said, smiling into Snape's hair. His other hand found Snape's balls through his trousers and kneaded lightly. "Though, I guess you deserve to take some of it out of my hide."

"Mmmm," Snape said into the hollow of his ear. "Perhaps we should use a safeword."

Harry grinned. "Like, 'oh, no, no, please stop'?"

Snape squeezed the middle of Harry's cock and ran his thumb over the head. "Hm. Like aubergine." Then he proceeded to use his other hand in such a manner that his combined actions caused Harry to arch his back and almost carry the two of them to the floor. As it was, they slid further down the sofa.

Harry was too distracted to wonder about Snape's choice of safeword. And he didn't use it either.

***

LATER:

"Where did you learn that thing where you bend your knee and..." Severus made a claw with his hand, opening and closing it. One eyebrow raised, and he smirked.

"Oh," Harry replied, his own hands kneading the pillow under his head, "a hustler in Tokyo. Why?"

"I'm just glad to see that the past eight years haven't been a waste."

Harry closed his eyes and stretched on the bed. It was soft and clean, and he hadn't checked under it for incendiary devices before he'd fallen into it, though he'd been fairly occupied at the time. He was planning to sleep there for the rest of the evening, and then the whole night. And then maybe the following night. And the night after that. It was a good thing to think about, as was the warm body that rolled further towards him.

"What shall you do now?" Severus mused, running one finger down and over the muscles of Harry's upper arms.

Harry shrugged. "Dunno. I suppose I could write my memoirs."

Severus rolled his eyes and fell forwards into the pillows. "And you'd have a captive audience. Perhaps you should devote one novel to each of your school years. _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_ , _Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets_. _Harry Potter and the Amazing Pain in the Arse_."

Harry smiled. "Which year would that be?"

"Fifth."

"Ah." He yawned and listened to birdsong outside the window. Amazingly, it was just birdsong. "I guess I'd have to go on book tours. Sign autographs. Do interviews. Be on the cover of _Witch Weekly_."

Severus smiled and returned the contagious yawn into his pillow. "Oh, sheer agony."

Harry pressed the length of his thigh into Severus's. "Nah. Let's leave the seven book deals for people like Gilderoy Lockhart." Severus rolled his eyes. Well, the one eye that Harry could see that wasn't smashed into the bed. "You know, should he recover."

"Mmm," was what he received in return. A hand snaked its way under the covers and found a rather delicate bit of him that had not received attention in quite a long time.

"There will be others, you know," he said into Severus's shoulder. "When they find out that I killed you a different way than expected—"

Severus groaned and his hand left Harry's body. "Why do people think that 'little death' orgasm joke is humorous?" He wrestled the duvet from Harry and tucked it under his other side. Harry remembered this—Severus slept completely cocooned. When he had left, they had been using two different sets of covers.

"They'll just hire someone else," he said, deciding not to be distracted.

Severus yawned again. "Oh, that contract has been cancelled." But he didn't offer anything else. Harry lay there in the dimness of the room and stared at the wallpaper for a bit, eyes tracing the fleur de lis pattern repeatedly.

"Hey," he said softly. "Severus?"

"Yes?"

"Did you, by any chance, take a contract out on yourself?"

"Yes."

"You...well that...well...you..."

Severus rose up on one elbow to face him, eyes hard. "You made me wait for eight years," he said plaintively. "Not that I _was_ waiting, per se—"

Harry made sure his face was sober. "Of course."

"But you are amazingly obstinate. And well." He waved a hand out at the room. "You never came for all of your things. How else was I to get you to pick up your Ramones LPs?"

Harry smiled. "I thought you threw them out."

Severus shoved his face back into his pillow. "If only. None of the recycling places would take them."

***

EVEN LATER:

"Wait a minute," Harry murmured later that evening, readjusting his shoulders so that he could look Severus in the eye without straining his neck. "How did you know?"

Severus opened his eyes and yawned. "Know what?" One of his hands reached under the covers to run his fingers down the small of Harry's back.

Harry shivered. "How did you know that I wouldn't just take the contract and kill you myself?"

Severus stilled his hand then, turning his head fully so that their foreheads touched, well, as much as they could around Severus's nose. "Because."

"Because."

"Because I know you, Harry Potter." Severus blinked and one corner of his mouth turned up in a smile. "I always have."

Harry blinked a few times and listened to the creaking of the house settling. For once, he didn't breathe rapidly, wondering if it was the stealthy approach of something bent on killing him. It wasn't a Dutch guild assassin, or one of Dolores's lackeys. It was wood, settling a house that was now partly his.

"Oh," he said, partly to himself, and partly to the face in front of him. "Oh, well then, okay."

***

THREE WEEKS LATER, A BEDROOM ABOVE WEASLEYS' WIZARDING WHEEZES, DIAGON ALLEY:

 _  
_

> _A—let's start a detective agency! We'll fight crime again! S. says he'll help. We need new location/business stratagem/contacts. Lease space and await us. When we get back from Rio we'l----_

 _  
_

The pen had obviously been dragged from the writer's hand, since the words devolved into a scribble and then a line that ran off the other end of the card. Angelina smiled. In the far corner of the card was a bit of small, neat and cramped printing: _**H. is busy. –S.**_

She sighed and rolled over onto her back. Fred raised his head from the pillow and blinked at her sleepily before seeing the card. On her other side, George snaked a hand about her waist and buried his face in her shoulder.

"Wuzzat? More notes from the dynamic duo?"

Angelina tossed the postcard off the bed and turned into George's arms then, feeling Fred press his body to her back, but her mind was already busy with plans: business cards, offices in Muggle London _and_ Diagon Alley, a billboard at the next Chudley Cannons game...

"Yeah," she said, smiling. "It's gonna be _wizard._ "

END

**Author's Note:**

> END NOTES:
> 
> 1) While I picked a Cyndi Lauper song as the theme for our team soundtrack, let me just say that I wrote most of this to an iTunes playlist on repeat. This playlist consisted of MCR's "Famous Last Words," FoB's Bang the Doldrums, Eiko Shimamiya's "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni" and Hush Sound's "Wine Red." If anything is wrong with this fic, it's the playlist's fault.
> 
> 2) I was going to type out all of the quotes from the film, but to be honest, I'd have to go through it again, and I'm tired. So I'll cop to some of the dialogue being from the film, most notably the summary. However, Angelina's line re: Bellatrix getting better is from Monty Python. The Winchester is the pub from Shawn of the Dead, as is the bartender Big Al. Lastly, the mention of iocane powder, the tasteless, colourless, odorless poison, is from The Princess Bride.
> 
> 3) The idea of a memorial corner at the reunion was shamelessly stolen from the memorial room at Prophecy in 2007. (I still giggle over Snape's offering plate full of hotel shampoo bottles.)
> 
> D) FINAL STATEMENTS: No one was hurt in the spatial relations research of this fic; all firearms represented in this film are real and should only be handled by experienced peoples; masonry is not a weapon; never feed butterbeer to randy fairies; your bluetooth does not make you look like a super spy; google Trogdor. Many Swedish fish (Bothans) gave their lives for this fic.


End file.
